In defense of dualism: Competing and complementary frameworks in religious studies and the sociology of religion

Abstract

The term “dualism” is used in quite divergent connotations across religious studies, sociology, theology, anthropology, and other academic fields. This paper characterizes the differing usages of the term, and uses them to explore the sometimes-converging and sometimes-orthogonal relationship between academic fields, with a focus on religious studies and the sociology of religion. I argue that although the two fields have mutually benefited from insights originating on either side of their divide—and thus converged in important ways—substantive differences remain. Their differing understandings of “dualism” represents important theoretical and analytic divergence, and the justified critique of certain forms of dualism has been used to reject all versions of the concept, including some—here termed “embodied dualism” or “experiential dualism”—that remain analytically crucial to the study of social life generally and religion particularly.

Keywords

Religious studies sociology of religion Durkheim Bellah experiential dualism embodied dualism

Oddly, in recent decades religious studies and the sociology of religion have simultaneously converged and yet failed to engage one another in some crucial ways. On one hand, as suggested by Robert Orsi in this collection, the two fields have converged via the rich and fascinating phenomena that constitute our shared focus of study, attaining overlapping and mutually complementary insights into religious phenomena. On the other hand, as emphasized by Marti in this collection, with occasional exceptions scholars rooted in the two approaches continue to exist largely in isolation from one another; we tend to reside mostly in different intellectual and organizational universes within which our work occupies divergent trajectories and sometimes comes to contradictory insights. In my view, both those dynamics are important and worthy of our attention. Notably, in this collection of essays, the sociologists (Marti, Cadge, and Barton, Wood) appear to perceive such a disjunction far more sharply than do the religious studies scholars (Orsi and Wilcox); the theologian (Paeth) represents a middle ground. In analyzing these dynamics, I argue that despite our convergences, our differences remain important—and that paying keen attention to them offers our best promise of real intellectual insight rather than endless diversity for its own sake. I first offer an example of ways we have converged onto shared perspectives, then use the concept of “dualism” to exemplify ways in which we continue to diverge, and to do so in intellectually important ways that we should not foreclose prematurely. In discussing dualism, I hope to be a tad tendentious in order to spark some constructive debate.

First, an example of the ways our two approaches have converged productively. Over the last two to three decades, sociologists of religion have learned deeply from the work of Robert Orsi and others on “lived religion” (Orsi, 1982, 1996, 2005, 2011). The whole literature on lived religion has offered new insight into personal, communal, and societal dynamics as they relate to religious practices in people’s lives, often “underneath” or “behind” any officially sanctioned religious institutions. Examples of sociological work broadly within the lived religion framework inspired by Orsi include work by Courtney Bender (2010) on “the new metaphysicals”; Wendy Cadge’s work (2005) on Theravada Buddhism in America; Saba Mahmood’s work (2005) on piety, feminism, and Islam¹; Gerardo Marti’s work (2008, 2010, 2014 with Gladys Ganiel) on creative-class evangelicalism; and David Smilde’s work (2007) on Pentecostal/evangelical conversion in Latin America. All these scholars have learned deeply from Orsi—as well as from the once-sidelined, now-flourishing ethnographic tradition within the sociology of religion—to do creative and insightful work on how people draw on religion and spirituality to build meaningful lives in the midst of daily experience.

Thus, “lived religion” has been embraced enthusiastically within leading-edge work in the sociology of religion over the last 10 years. You can see the resulting insight in the “religion on the edge” effort that strives to de-center traditional sociology of religion away from a narrow focus on congregations and institutionalized forms of religion, and re-center it on lived religion in diverse settings (Bender et al., 2013).

I think this convergence has happened on the best of terms. The lived religion literature in both its incarnations—within religious studies and within the sociology of religion—rightly argues for de-centering the study of religion away from a narrow focus on congregations and other formal institutions, an insight drawn from the religious studies side of the dialectic. Simultaneously, at their best these literatures also draw from the sociological side of the dialectic, recognizing that the power of lived religion is typically dependent on previously institutionalized religious forms: lived religious practices may have profound impact on society by conferring legitimacy on political actors (candidates, social movements, the state, or non-governmental actors such as human rights organizations, indigenous organizations, insurgencies, and nationalist parties). But those spiritual practices themselves were typically previously legitimated via religious institutions; or, conversely, those spiritual practices become legitimated to the extent that they take on institutionalized forms (for example via “New Age” spiritual bookstores, Wiccan accepted practices, or networks of “non-denominational” Christian congregations that look and function like denominations—all of which are forms of institutionalization in the sociological sense). That is, lived religion often gains its own power of legitimation from religious institutions.

Thus, the two sides of the conversation brought different “founding insights” to the table: an emphasis on lived religion arising first within religious studies and an emphasis on institutions originating within the sociology of religion from its founding. But rather than fighting unproductively over which is “right,” it seems to me that both sides have appropriated key insights from the other and now think of lived religion and religious institutions as existing within a dynamic tension and process of mutual constitution that does at least rough justice to the rich complexity of actual human social life.

Against too-easy convergence: The richness of divergent theory

Even as I celebrate that rough justice and the rich cross-fertilization between analytic approaches grounded in religious studies and sociology, I also think we should insist on our differences where they exist. Scott Paeth in this collection discusses “the theological uses of sociology.” The theology–sociology dialogue will be most symbiotic when we are clear about the differences underlying those disciplines. Likewise, we will learn most from each other in the broad religious studies–sociology dialogue when we not only seek common ground but also press contrasting insights and arguments. In my view, the “transdisciplinarity” for which Melissa Wilcox argues in this collection can be (and has been) fruitful precisely to the extent that its interlocutors are also well-grounded in disciplinary theory, argument, and evidence.

One such “line of difference” concerns the standards of what counts as evidence, rigorous analysis, and critical intellectual judgment within the two disciplines as pointed out by Gerardo Marti in this collection; we have something important to learn there.

But I also want to highlight a substantive and conceptual line of difference between the two disciplines (though also partly within each). I am unconvinced that the two disciplines have converged on an adequate way of conceiving of the role of religion in human life. This comes to a point sharply around the question of “dualism” within religion. The whole question of the status of dualism as an analytic stance and ontological reality in people’s lives is complex terrain, to which I can hardly aspire to do justice in this short-format article. But it seems to me that much contemporary scholarship—both work grounded in religious studies and work in the sociology of religion that has been shaped by religious studies—simply rejects dualism whole cloth. I want to problematize that move, and use it as an example of the divergent intellectual standpoints of the two disciplines and why they matter.

Before proceeding, let me clarify that in defending a certain kind of dualism, I do not defend any of three kinds of dualism that both disciplines have rightly rejected. First, we all (I think) rightly reject a theoretical dualism that is rooted in a narrowly construed rationalism—and ultimately in Greek anti-body Neo-Platonism—that would place theology and other theoretical strands of religion on a higher plane than lived religion. Relatedly, we all rightly reject a body–mind or a body–spirit dualism that posits the body in particular (and usually the material world in general) as a secondary, less good or evil dimension of reality, or as essentially unreal. Of course, some scholars do embrace the opposite reduction of all reality to its materiality, but that is beyond present purposes. Whatever the stance of individual scholars or whole disciplines toward the spiritual, as scholars we can only know its workings via how it manifests itself via the material world; as cognitive science has advanced, we also increasingly recognized that all spiritual experience is mediated physically and biochemically—even as many of us refuse to reduce spiritual experience to those mediations. Likewise, we all (I think) rightly reject the kind of empirical dualism that divides people’s experience into a dichotomy between a focus on this-worldly dimensions of religion in daily life and an other-worldly dimension of religion in some posited afterlife. Whatever its rhetorical power in the hands of religious entrepreneurs, such religious dichotomization cannot undergird intellectual work, for it removes some part of religious experience from empirical analysis.² For the social scientist, all experience must be accessible to empirical analysis.

But are these the only relevant forms of dualism? In rejecting these, should we therefore reject dualism across-the-board as a foundation of scholarly inquiry? I argue against any such rejection. As a case study of the importance of disciplinary-rooted knowledge, I argue that theoretical dualism, body–mind dualism, and empirical dualism are not the only forms of dualism—and that recognizing this is crucial for analyzing religion.

The sociological tradition descended from Emile Durkheim’s later work asserts a qualitatively different kind of dualism. The crucial insight that I think the study of religion in any serious guise cannot do without is already embedded in the title of one of the earliest works in the sociology of religion: Durkheim’s “the dualism of human nature and its social conditions” ([1914] 1973). Durkheim’s core argument concerns the dual structure of the human person as a social animal rooted in society. He articulates that dual structure as a distinction between the sacred and the profane, but the underlying point is to identify a dual structure at the heart of human society, and thus human consciousness, from its origins to the present. That dual structure is constitutive of what it means to be human, because each person is always already both a separate organism pursuing self-preservation, reproduction, and the needs of daily life, and simultaneously a socially constituted being at least potentially aware of a reality that transcends the self and its needs. That “transcendent” reality is conceived sociologically as society, conceived culturally as meaning, and conceived religiously under the various ways human communities have sought to name, understand, and experience it. For the sociologist, it is “transcendent” not in the sense of pursuing other-worldly goals or otherwise being separate from the world, but rather in its capacity to pull the self beyond immediate needs of daily life and to illuminate those pressing realities via a wider perspective. Here, I can only gesture at this insight by suggesting it might best be captured via a term such as embodied dualism or experiential dualism.³ This “embodied dualism” perspective represents a kind of analytical dualism that—though Durkheim originally articulated it more than a hundred years ago—anticipates very recent work in evolutionary biology in how it understands the human person’s relationship to her surroundings.

I am driven to defend this certain understanding of embodied or experiential dualism by a specific analytic concern. It is true that the study of religion for some time lost its analytic bite by focusing excessively on religion’s often other-worldly self-understanding and by accepting the theoretical dualism of the western philosophical tradition. But at the other extreme lies an equally costly outcome. Religion draws much of its psychological and social dynamism from the way it taps into the human experience of our dualistic human nature. We may normatively reject the ways some religions do so some of the time, but if we lose the conceptual frameworks that allow us to understand religion in its social sources, we will also lose our capacity to analyze, appreciate, or critique it adequately. Embodied, experiential dualism offers precisely such a conceptual framework.

That is, if religion is rooted in an experiential dualism embedded deep in the evolutionary origins of the human species, a dualism that is thus not a projection of western rationalism nor of spiritual mysticism, then we will not explain religion’s power in any setting around the world without a corresponding concept. Religious studies scholars and sociologists of religion alike should embrace an analytic understanding of dualism, while rightly rejecting other understandings that lack a basis in the shared matrix of deep human evolutionary history. I think both disciplines are currently at risk of losing that perspective, and that theoretical frameworks rooted in sociology and evolutionary biology can pull us back from that risk.

I illustrate the risk by citing the example of Talal Asad’s work (Asad, 1993, 2003). While Asad has offered rich insight into the relationships between Christianity, Islam, and the secular, his work also seems to me to lose an adequate ability to appreciate the richness of religious experience in many human communities and individuals. This is because underlying Asad’s work lies a rejection of any kind of dualism; he sees all binaries, “belief and knowledge, reason and imagination, history and fiction, symbol and allegory, natural and supernatural, sacred and profane” (1993: 23) as projections of western rationalism onto the universal human canvas. His genealogical project is then to show how, across each of these pairings, the two sides mutually constitute and penetrate one another conceptually, linguistically, and historically. He uses this to rightly show how “the sacred and the secular depend on each other” (Asad, 2003: 26). Yet Asad sees these false binaries and mutual dependence as fundamentally undermining all dualisms.

In contrast, such mutual dependence is precisely what one expects within the analytic dualism of the sociological tradition that I embrace (Wood, 2014). Mustafa Emirbayer (1996), in his finely titled article “Useful Durkeim,” conceives of such dualisms in Durkheim as analytic categories useful precisely because so much of social life occurs in the relationships within each pairing. Thus, Emirbayer (1996: 115, emphasis mine) writes of “the polarity of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane.’” Like magnetic poles, such polarities can attract, repel, and interact in complex patterns—wherein lies their centrality in understanding society.

I fully embrace Asad’s insights into the disciplinary power of religion and his critique of much scholarly work that isolates religion from the power dynamics operating in society and in human history. But I am entirely unconvinced that his position in fact undermines the fundamental sociological conception of a certain kind of analytical dualism. Rather, Asad’s critique of dualism falls off target because what is meant by “dualism” shifts meanings in a kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand: Asad in effect rightly argues against any theoretical dualism and empirical dualism, while claiming thereby to undermine the analytical dualism represented by Durkheim and later sociological work descended from him, including Bellah and Emirbayer. I have termed such an analytic stance “experiential dualism” and believe the insight it captures to be not just “useful” but absolutely indispensable for the study of religion.

Finally, a thought regarding the relationship of sociology to what Wilcox in this collection terms “confessional” and “non-confessional” religious studies. My own belief is that we all—sociologists, confessional theologians and religious scholars, and non-confessional religious studies scholars—make normative assumptions in our work. I do not think that the claim to practicing verstehen, whether done by sociologists or non-confessional religious studies scholars, inoculates us from the risks of normativity, as Wilcox seems to believe. Rather, we all take those risks, and confessional theologians often do so more transparently than the rest of us. Thus, to venture an answer to Paeth’s concluding question in his essay here: perhaps one of the ways theology is useful to sociology (and to non-confessional religious studies) is by implicitly challenging us to recognize our own normative assumptions rather than claiming to transcend them.

Conclusion

I hope that in the continuing cross-fertilization of religious studies and sociology, and amidst the current fashion of rejecting dualism, we avoid the intellectual sleight-of-hand that uses rejection of some forms of dualism to justify rejection of all dualism. Instead, may we pursue vigorously an analytic agenda that pays full attention to both “lived” and “institutional” religion, and in doing so may we bring to bear a conceptual framework that does justice to human experience and the evolutionary roots of religion—including an explicit focus on embodied, experiential dualism. Such a framework can better sustain the long-term dialogue between sociological and other approaches to the study of religion. More importantly, only such a conceptual framework allows us to fully see and thus analyze religion in its surprising power and dynamism.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

For opening this dialogue across the divide between religious studies and the sociology of religion, kudos to the following: the Sociology of Religion Group of the American Academy of Religion, the Association for the Sociology of Religion, and Rebekka King and Warren Goldstein at Critical Research on Religion (crr.sagepub.org). An earlier version of this paper was presented at their jointly sponsored session at the 2015 Association for the Sociology of Religion meetings.

Notes

Author biography

Richard L Wood, (Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico) studies the cultural and institutional bases of democratic life, especially those rooted in religion. Wood teaches courses on political culture, religion, social theory, community organizing, and ethnographic methods. His books include A Shared Future: Faith-Based Organizing for Racial Equity and Ethical Democracy (University of Chicago, 2015; with Brad Fulton), winner of the ARNOVA 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action; and Faith in Action (University of Chicago, 2002), recognized as best book of 2002 by the American Sociological Association's religion section. His article in the American Sociological Review (with Ruth Braunstein and Brad Fulton) won the 2016 Clifford Geertz Award from the American Sociological Association.

References

Asad

(1993) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Asad

(2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bellah

(2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bender

(2010) The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Bender C, Levitt P, Cadge W, et al. (eds) (2013) Religion on the Edge: De-Centering and Re-Centering the Sociology of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cadge

(2005) Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Durkheim

([1914] 1973) The dualism of human nature and its social conditions. In: Bellah

(ed.) Durkheim on Morality and Society, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 149–166 (Originally published in 1914 as Le dualisme de la nature humaine et sus conditions sociales, Scientia 15: 206–221).

Emirbayer

(1996) Useful Durkheim. Sociological Theory 14(2): 109–130.

Mahmood

(2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

10.

Marti

(2010) Ego-affirming evangelicalism: How a Hollywood church appropriates religion for workers in the creative class. Sociology of Religion 71(1): 52–75.

11.

Marti

(2008) Hollywood Faith Holiness, Prosperity, and Ambition in a Los Angeles Church, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

12.

Marti

Ganiel

(2014) The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity, New York: Oxford University Press.

13.

Orsi

(1982) The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

14.

Orsi

(1996) Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

15.

Orsi

(2005) Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

16.

Orsi

(2011) The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

17.

Smilde

(2007) Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

18.

Wood

(2014) Advancing the grounded study of religion and society in Latin America. In: Rubin

Smile

Junge

(eds) Lived Citizenship and Lived Religion in Latin America’s Zones of Crisis, A Special Issue of The Latin American Research Review vol. 49, Pittsburgh, PA: Latin American Studies Association, pp. 185–193.