Baha'i
Buddhist worldview traditions
Christian worldview traditions
Contextualising the diversity of worldviews
Hindu worldview traditions
Humanist worldview traditions
Jain
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jewish worldview traditions
Muslim worldview traditions
Pagan
Rastafari
Sikhi worldview traditions
Soka Gakkai
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Zoroastrian
Research

What is religion?

Christian Smith

Research Summary

This is a themed report of relevant chapters of Christian Smith’s book Religion: What it is, how it works, and why it matters. This report focuses on the definition of religion; the how it works and why it matters themes will be covered in later reports. In a review of the book, Jose Casanova describes its definition of religion as ‘the best theoretical and analytical definition I know’. Smith grounds the need to understand religion in the need to understand the world. The approach is sociological and focuses on practices. Whilst certainly not avoiding discussion of religious beliefs, it takes a compatibilist approach to questions of their truth; meaning, the account of religion given is compatible with different religious, agnostic or atheistic truth-claims. The definition of religion is worth quoting in full, from page 3:

‘Religion is a complex of culturally prescribed practices that are based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers. These powers may be personal or impersonal, but they are always superhuman in the dual sense that they can do things which humans cannot do and that they do not depend for their existence on human activities. Religious people engage in complexes of practices in order to gain access to and communicate or align themselves with these superhuman powers. The hope involved in the cultural prescribing of these practices is to realize human goods and avoid bads, especially (but not only) to avert misfortunes and receive blessings and deliverance from crises.’

Researcher

Christian Smith

Research Institution

University of Notre Dame

What is this about?

This is about understanding what religion is. Questions of how it works, why people are religious and why religions matter are taken up in different parts of Smith’s book, and will be treated in later research reports.

‘Anyone who wants to understand the world today has got to understand religion . . . Understanding many major problems today is impossible without accounting for religion’s influences . . . religion remains a crucial feature of human life.’ (Pages 1-2.)

What was done?

The book is a scholarly social scientific enquiry into its subject matter, drawing on a wide range of theories and studies in order to back up its conclusions. It uses examples of lived contemporary religion to illustrate these at regular points of the argument.

Main findings and outputs

  • Religion is a set of practices, based on convictions about superhuman powers.
  • The practices aim for access to, communication with, or alignment with the powers, which may be held to be personal or impersonal, towards the end of realizing human goods.
  • Religion also has secondary aspects, or ‘causal capacities’ that shape the characters of its different traditions and exert influence on the world. These include forms of social identity and community, aesthetic expressions, agencies of social control, authority, and so on.
  • Beliefs can of course be highly significant within religions. ‘There is no religion without some beliefs.’ (Page 30). But religion must be conceptually defined with reference to practices and their culturally prescribed meanings.
  • Individual people can participate in any religious practice from a wide variety of motivations, without fully or consciously agreeing with the related ‘established’ beliefs; the focus needs to be on the culture and tradition, what it says those practices mean and aim to achieve. ‘Religious practices are social realities irreducible to the beliefs of the people who enact them.’ (Page 32).
  • The subjective intentions of religious people matter hugely as examples of religiousness, and should be investigated, but this is a different question to that of the conceptual definition of religion.

Relevance to RE

The relevance of Smith’s analysis to RE is in offering some clarifications on subject aims and pedagogy. (Notice that the CORE report lays emphasis on understanding religion as a conceptual category and that Smith’s analysis offers a way to do this.) On Smith’s analysis, the primary subject matter would be religion, namely the range of religious practices observable in the world. What happens during these practices? For what goods do they aim? There would then be two secondary layers of enquiry, one into how repeated religious practices flow into aspects such as social identity, aesthetic expression and power, another into religiousness at the individual level.

Generalisability and potential limitations

Readers are certainly encouraged to read this book and consider further how its material might be relevant to RE practice. One clear limitation is that more discussion would be needed on how to base studies of non-religious worldviews on Smith’s model. Whether religions are best described as worldviews is also called into question. The model cannot provide a basis for a philosophical approach to RE where pupils are helped to debate religious truth-claims (but, again, would be compatible with one).

Find out more

Christian Smith, Religion: What it is, how it works, and why it matters, Princeton and Oxford (Princeton University Press): 2017.

For a brief summary and order details (paperback available at £17.99) see https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11200.html . Casanova’s review of the book is at https://academic.oup.com/jcs/article-abstract/61/1/126/5303792?redirectedFrom=fulltext

 

Back to top