Studies of Religion Need the Corrective Lens of Social Science

You should read Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion. The author, sociologist Samuel Perry, will help you understand how social scientists think about religion. Most importantly, his work will improve how you think about religion too. 

I come by this evaluation honestly. I have been a member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion for 40 years and served as executive officer for 10 of those. I am certain social science supplies a lens on religious practice that corrects common misunderstandings about religion. This book clearly and concisely describes that lens and how to focus it.

Over the first decade of his career, Perry has written effectively on an impressive array of topics. It’s worth asking why he felt the need to champion the social-scientific perspective as a valuable tool for understanding religion. First, he is worried the most common mistaken assumptions about religion are not just untrue but actively dangerous. We are looking at the wrong things and failing to see what’s really happening, sometimes with very negative consequences. The first four chapters lay out the nature of the problem, offering three primary examples of the mistakes and their consequences.

Second, Perry is concerned that academia wrongheadedly dismisses the study of religion, either by ignoring it or actively resisting it. Chapters 5 and 6 make his argument that this should stop. To be honest, the first four chapters of this book will benefit people who want to know more about how religion works; the last two chapters are mostly insider baseball for professionals. They follow clearly from Chapters 1–4, but they shift the conversation from Perry explaining things for everyone to Perry pleading with, and sometimes admonishing, sociological colleagues. 

The book is so clearly written that I could very nearly summarize it for you here, but the full argument is important enough to consider in full. Here’s the gist: Western understandings of religion have been defined by the Anglo-Protestant tradition. Those of us who have taught about world religions know this by heart. Students who grow up within this tradition imagine everything is about beliefs, sacred texts, ideas, and individual choice. It is a long, hard slog to help them realize, first, that not all religions are doctrine-based, and second, that even their own religions are less about doctrine than they think.

The three “argument” chapters follow this idea closely. Argument one: The Anglo-Protestant tradition holds up beliefs as the cognitive force in religion. In reality, religion is primarily shaped by social identity and norms.

I’m convinced Perry is right about this; I’ve written about it myself. When my students imagine that people choose from a menu of beliefs, I ask them, “Do you really think most people in Italy, Ireland, and Mexico looked at the menu and chose ‘Catholic’?” As Perry points out, this is the hardest nut to crack, and he goes after it with a hammer. (An aside: If Perry manages to get everyone to read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, that alone was worth his time.)

Argument two: The Anglo-Protestant tradition proposes that ideas and doctrines drive growth or decline in religion. The truth is more mundane. Population dynamics drive religious growth and decline. By 2050, give or take, there will be as many Muslims in the world as Christians. Is this because Muslim ideas will vanquish Christian ideas? No. It’s because Muslims will have more kids and raise them to be Muslims.

Argument three: The Anglo-Protestant tradition suggests that individuals, and their obedience to their beliefs, are the principal agents of religious change. In fact, the real driver is social structure. This chapter gets the thickest. Those who aren’t social scientists may need to spend slightly more time here, but I can give you an overview. 

Why did religious institutions in America become steadily less influential over the 20th century? Because the state got steadily more influential. Authority, power, charity, justice, access to resources—the state came to provide these things much more than religion did. How could religion not become structurally less important? (Given this, is it any wonder then that conservative religious believers tend to distrust the state, or that many people now polarize around politics the way they once polarized around religion?)

I will not go far into the chapters on academia here. Perry is right about the shoddy way that secular universities treat the study of religion. He notes that scholars who are personally religious are accused of “me-search,” studying things that are about themselves. These religious religion scholars are presumed to be conservative and, therefore, wrong. 

Perry mentions that “me-search” is common and unproblematic in other research topics. I’d go much further and say personal experience is considered a sign of authenticity in racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual-identity studies, but not in religion. Or, put another way, white scholars are often not trusted to study Blackness, and straight scholars are often not trusted to study alternative modes of sexuality, but nonreligious scholars are more trusted to study religion. 

On the whole, Religion for Realists deserves your close attention. But the book has two related problems, both of which stem from inadequate attention to broader intellectual trends shaping the study of religion.

The first problem arises from Perry’s description of the Western perception that religion is primarily about beliefs, which he terms a “folk understanding of religion.” This fits his argument. He wants the reader to “start thinking more in terms of unconscious bias and group loyalties than self-conscious beliefs; more about fertility rates, cohorts, and immigration than doctrines.” 

Perry surely knows, but doesn’t acknowledge clearly enough, that this change is never going to happen.I first read this book on my flight to the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature. There, I was surrounded by around 10,000 scholars, many of whom have dedicated their lives to more careful readings of Scripture, to literary analysis (however postmodern), to ethics, and to writing and rewriting history. All of that effort is about ideas, and none of it amounts to folk religion. 

Perry is correct that other scholars don’t take religion seriously enough. Most sociologists will tell you that if you know ethnicity, race, social class, and gender roles, you can explain religion without referring to anything religious at all. Perry needs to come a little cleaner that this is not quite what he thinks. He is, after all, personally religious, as he discusses in the book. 

In reality, the relationship between ideas and social structure is not an either/or proposition. The great sociologist Max Weber said that while the material causes and social structure are hugely important, ideas are the “switchmen” that track and guide human action. Perry wants to add the more materialist social-scientific perspective as a corrective to the mistaken view that ideas determine everything, but this corrective runs the risk of not taking the ideas seriously enough. It is true that people wrongly think religion is primarily about beliefs, but it is also true that religion, especially Western religion, really is about beliefs. A helpful corrective cannot become the sole alternative.

The second, related problem is that Perry frequently uses conservative religious believers as examples of people who grasp the social-scientific perspective on religion and deploy it to their own advantage. In his view, they intentionally tie religious culture and traditions to ethnicity, nationalism, and notions of “blood and soil.” He is, again, totally correct. He and his colleagues have done impressive work on Christian nationalism, for instance. After all, once modernity is underway, an individualizing social structure does not go easily back in its box. Pushing back in favor of tradition requires something hard and forceful, like authoritarianism.

I think Perry is right that the current authoritarian push is a reaction against certain changes in the social structure over the past 60 or 70 years. However, the problem is that it is disingenuous to accuse conservatives, even authoritarians, of having a conscious, informed plan to place society on their doctrinal track while neglecting to acknowledge that this track is at war with an equally conscious, informed plan to remove religious culture and ideas from the marketplace of human endeavors altogether. 

It is no accident that the secular university is so opposed to studying religion. Antonio Gramsci, one of the most influential Marxists at the turn of the 20th century, proposed breaking the cultural hegemony of the ruling class by undermining its reigning ideologies in religion, among other spheres. In the 1960s, Rudi Dutschke called for a “long march through institutions,” with Marxist materialism working gradually through the state and public education to undermine traditionalist culture, including religion. What we are seeing now in liberal arts and social science departments is the success of this march.

There are authoritarians who use the same tactics as Marxists, consciously, to push back. But describing them as intentionally reactionary without noting what they are reacting against is simply inaccurate. I kept waiting for Perry to acknowledge the leftist tilt of sociology, but he is so committed to the discipline as a scientific enterprise that he talks about eliminating bias without acknowledging where the bias begins. All science must guard against bias, but sociology was invented to challenge traditionalist understandings of values and culture.

In the end, however, I believe Perry has done a great service by arguing persuasively for a social-scientific perspective to adjust and correct understandings of religion that focus too much on belief and doctrine. It is very important to see the social, material, and demographic factors that drive religious change. Seeing these factors will not convince a single reader of this review to regard ideas and beliefs as irrelevant to religion—and it shouldn’t. Western religion is about ideas and beliefs, but it is never only or even primarily about that.  

To understand the world around us, we must see ideas and the social forces in constant, interlocking motion. And we must understand that the most effective change agents use ideas and social forces, sometimes consciously and intentionally, to nudge society in their preferred direction.

Arthur E. Farnsley II is research professor of religious studies at Indiana University Indianapolis. He is senior research fellow for The Center for the Study of Religion & American Culture.

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