Approaches to Religious Studies

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Approaches to Religious Studies

• By Kwan Shui-man

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Class Discussion

• What is Religion?

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Some definitions

• Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed
  creature, the heart of a heartless world, the
  soul of souless circumstances. It is the opium of
  the people. (Marx)
• A religion is a unified system of beliefs and
  practices relative to sacred things - that is to
  say, things set apart and forbidden - beliefs and
  practices which unite into one single moral
  community all those who adhere to them.
  (Durkheim)
• A system of symbols which acts to establish
  powerful, pervasive and long-lasting moods and
  motivations in men by formulating conceptions of
  a general order of existence and clothing these
  conceptions with such an aura of factuality that
  the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic
  (Geertz)
• Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily
  to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts,
  and experiences of individual men in their
  solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
  stand in relation to whatever they may consider
  the divine (William James)

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• "Religious ideas...are illusions, fulfillments of
  the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of
  mankind...(They are) born from mans need to make
  his helplessness tolerable and built up from the
  material of memories of the helplessness of his
  own childhood and the childhood of the human
  race." Religion is "the universal obsessional
  neurosis of humanity like the obsessional
  neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus
  complex, out of the relation to the father."
  (Freud)
• Religion is the state of being grasped by an
  ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all
  other concerns as preliminary and which itself
  contains the answer to the question of the
  meaning of our life. (Tillich)

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• Ninian Smarts 7 dimensions (The Worlds
  Religions)
  
• Practical or Ritual Dimension
• Experiential and Emotional Dimension
• Narrative or Mythic Dimension
• Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension
• Ethical and Legal Dimension
• Social and Institutional Dimension
• Material Dimension

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Religious Studies as Polymethodical

• Anthropological approaches
• Feminist approaches
• Phenomenological approaches
• Philosophical approaches
• Psychological approaches
• Sociological approaches
• Theological approaches

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Anthropological
feminist
sociological
Practical or Ritual Dimension Experiential and Em
otional Dimension Narrative or Mythic Dimension
Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension
Ethical and Legal Dimension Social and Institutio
nal Dimension Material Dimension
psychological
theological
phenomenological
philosophical
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Psychological Approach

• The hard end
• Physiological psychology
• Behaviourism
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• The soft end
• Psychodynamic schools
• Humanistic psychologies
• Existential psychologies
• Transpersonal psychologies

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• The hard endconcerns
• Religious attitudesreligious inclinations,
  religious values, social-religious-political
  attitudes, religious concerns
  
• Religious orientationsmotivation (intrinsic vs
  extrinsic), proneness to religious beliefs
  
• Religious developmentdepth of religious
  experience, faith development/maturity
  
• Religious commitment and involvement
• Religious/Moral values or personal
  characteristics
  
• Religious coping and problem-solving
• Spirituality and mysticism
• God-Concept

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Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion

• Jay L. Wenger, Implicit Components of Religious
  Beliefs
  
• -the emergence of beliefs

Dual Process Theories
Experiment Subliminal Priming Procedure
Controlled process
Automatic process
Automatic activiation
explicit process
Implicit process
Spontaneous application
Slow and Conscious
Fast and nonConscious
Religious Beliefs
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Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion
2. The Heuristic of Representativeness (e.g.
Daniel Kahneman Amos Tversky, Subjective
Probability A Judgment of Representativeness)
- the maintenance of beliefs

• e.g.

Gods Act!
Among the 23, my birthday is your birthday!
Highly representative (like goes with like)
Not random
The probability of having a birthday23/365 1/16
343 days left without any birthday
Highly non-representative
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Some Examples of Psychological Studies of Religion

• 3. Self-Disclosure and Prayer (e.g. Larry
  VandeCreek et al., "Praying About Difficult
  Experiences as Self-Disclosure to God)

• Expresssion of Insights
• Expression of Negative Emotions
• Expression of Positive Emotion
• Causal Expressions

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• Some Theoretical Concerns
• Origin of Religion (e.g. evolutionary theory
  hypnotizability and Shamanic Trance)
  
• Why do people believe? (e.g. low cognitive
  ability, high stress leveletc.)
  
• How are Beliefs sustained?
• How are Beliefs discarded/changed?

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Anthropological Approach

• 3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus
• General sequence of thematic focus
• Origin Function Meaning ...
• 1860s-1900
• Study of origin
• Evolutionism
• Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, Spencer,
  Durkheim
  
• 1900-1950
• Study of function
• Functionalism
• Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown,
  Evans-Pritchard
  
• 1950-1980s
• Study of meaning
• Interpretive anthropology, symbolist
  anthropology, (structuralism)
  
• Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Douglas, Leach,
  (Lévi-Strauss) etc

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• 1950s-1980s
• Ethnographic focus
• primitive religions
• local forms of world religions (1950s)
• Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism
• Religious movements in the Third World
• The context of culture contact
• Millenarian movements
• Revitalization movements
• Eg. Ghost Dance, Peyote cult, cargo cults

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Participant Observationa frequently used
Anthropological Method

• What
• It requires living with the community being
  studied, learning its language
  
• and participating in its life without seeking to
  alter it.
  
• As a participant, the scholar simply observes and
  tries to get as close as possible to seeing a
  religion from the inside
  
• Thick Description
• Describing multi-dimensionally and
  multi-contextually what a person is doing
  
• And what the person thinks s/he is doing

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Phenomenological Approach

• AimStructure of Religiosity
• Overall Taskimaginatively entering into the
  world of the religious person
  
• Understand as the religious person does
• See the world thru eyes of the religious person
• Make the subject of study speak with its own
  authentic voice
  
• Accurate description of what is seen and heard

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Steps

• Distancing fr researchers own position
• Bracketingattitudes, value judgments,
  presuppositions
  
• Crossing the cultural distance (as researcher
  becomes the participant)
  
• Empathy
• Sympathetic imagination
• Seeing the essentials in the materials and any
  situation being studied
  
• Essence of a religious phenomenon is realised and
  understood in its manifestations

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An examplemy previous research in Charismatic
Christianity

• The structure of charismatic experience
• Separation Liminality reaggregation
• Liminality and Sacrality