What is religion?

199 Pages·2014·1.367 MB·English

by  Jeppe Sinding Jensen

WHAT IS RELIGION?
Religious belief is one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous characteristics
of human society. Religion has shadowed and illuminated human lives since
the earliest times, shaping the worldviews of cultures from isolated tribes to
vast empires. Starting from the premise that religion is a concept referring
to human activities, which can be analysed and compared across time and
cultures, What is Religion? brings the most up-to-date scholarship to bear
on humankind’s most enduring creation.
Th e book opens with a brief history of the idea of religion, then divides
the study of religion into four essential topics – types, representations,
practices and institutions – and concludes with a fi nal, eye-opening chapter
on religion today. Packed with case studies from a wide range of religions,
past and present, What is Religion? off ers a very current, comprehensive,
yet intellectually challenging overview of the history, theories, practices
and study of religion.
Accessible, wide-ranging, engaging and short, What is Religion? is writ-
ten primarily for undergraduate students in the study of religion, but it will
also be invaluable for students of anthropology, history, psychology, soci-
ology and theology as well as anyone interested in how and why humans
came and continue to be religious.
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What is religion?
Jeppe Sinding Jensen
First published in 2014 by Acumen
Published 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group,
an informa business
© Jeppe Sinding Jensen, 2014
Th is book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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isbn: 978- 1- 84465- 758-2 (hardcover)
isbn: 978- 1- 84465- 759-9 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Contents
Preface: What is this thing called religion? vii
1. Introduction: some ideas about religion 1
2. A very short history of the idea of religion 13
3. Types and elements of religion 39
4. Beliefs, ideas and representations 61
5. Religious practices and behaviours, also known as “ritual” 95
6. Institutions: ethics, morality and norms in religion 133
7. Religion today: modernity, postmodernity and secularization 155
8. A brief conclusion 169
References 173
Index 181
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Preface
What is this thing
called religion?
Religion is the subject of this volume. Not any particular religion, here or
there, now or then, but religion in general as a human social and cultural
fact. Whatever one may think of religion, it is a fact that there is religion
in the world and that religion has been an integral part of human cultural
history. Now, there are many books about many religions, in many histori-
cal and contemporary shapes and sizes, but there are very few books about
religion as an object of general and comparative investigation. Th is book is
intended to help redress that situation and provide the reader with an intro-
duction to what the academic study of religion has to say about the question
“What is religion?” Scholars and scientists from many academic disciplines
study religion and so it should be interesting to look into what they do, how
they do it and why they do it. Th ese questions obviously involve theoreti-
cal issues and in that respect this book is also intended as a contribution,
however modest, to theorizing about religion in general.
Th e term religion is used here to indicate that religions (in the plural)
have so much in common, in spite of all apparent diff erences, that it is
meaningful to talk about religion in general and use the term as the label
of an abstract category covering a wide range of human behaviours. In this
sense, the term “religion” and its associated categorizing function analo-
gously to “sport”, “art”, “language” or “economy” – other abstract terms
used to broadly classify features of human behaviour. Like those other fea-
tures, religion consists in modes of human social behaviour and that alone
should be reason enough to venture a general and comparative study of
its many variations. Each of them can be said to exemplify various aspects
or dimension of the total “universe” or “world” of religion. Not all reli-
gions share all the same features, but typically they include ideas about
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PREFACE
superhuman agents, human fate aft er death, morality, ideas about the
order of nature and the cosmos, conceptions of an “other world” and – not
least – how humans are to behave and think in this world. Th e concept of
religion applied in this book is intentionally extensive, for reasons to be
given below.
Th e inclusive approach of this book is novel in terms of the methods
and theories applied. It is deliberately complex and ranges from evolu-
tionary psychology, across social anthropology, historical textual studies
to the philosophy of language … and then some. Th e many approaches
of the comparative and general studies of religion are a necessary toolkit
in order to understand religion more fully as one of the most pervasive
and universal characteristics of humanity. In today’s world, religion is still
a domain of human thought and behaviour that attracts much attention
across cultures, in the media and in politics. An enquiry into the nature of
religion is as relevant as ever, and surely more can be said now than before.
Religion appears to have been with humanity for a very long time. It
certainly has changed over time, but some of its main characteristics trace
back into early human cultural evolution. However, the secular study of
religion as a human endeavour is quite recent, and is a result of histori-
cal, scientifi c and philosophical changes in modern intellectual history.
It has not been equally welcomed in all places. Some think that religion
should be studied religiously because that is the only way to understand
it, some that it is impossible because of the variations among particular
religions, and some that it is impertinent as it does not adequately respect
religious sentiments. Still others opine that “religion” is a specifi c social
formation with particular social entailments, that is, “religion” is a modern
ideological construct used to classify and dominate politically. Th is book
endeavours to present religion as part of human practice in a religiously
and politically unbiased manner. However non-apologetic, it is not theo-
retically unbiased, as will become evident below. I have aimed to produce
a book that will assist the concerned reader in understanding both the
complex phenomenon of religion and how religion has become and is an
object of scholarly enquiry more than a way of life to be followed.
Th us, the main idea of this book is that religions, in all their appar-
ent diversity, are products of the human mind and of human activity. For
those reasons alone it is plausible that they do have something in com-
mon and that it is possible to conduct comparative studies of religions
and a general study of religion. Th e general hypothesis is that, as religions
are made by humans, not only the study of religion but also other human
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PREFACE
sciences, from psychology to philosophy, can provide important contribu-
tions to our understanding and explanation of religion and religions. As
a human social construct, religion is no more mysterious or less acces-
sible than politics, language or sports. Th e anthropologist Cliff ord Geertz
once noted that culture consists of “social events like any other; they are
as public as marriage and as observable as agriculture” (Geertz 1973: 91).
Th e same holds for religion and religions. We may make a helpful distinc-
tion here between “e-religion”, which consists of mind-external, objective
social and public religion on the one hand and “i-religion”, which consists
of mental phenomena such as representations, intentions and beliefs on
the other. But again, those mental phenomena are only interesting when
objectifi ed, made public, written down or communicable in other modes
of externalization. Th erefore, religion is not ontologically mysterious nor is
it epistemically intractable: religion consists of beliefs and behaviours held
and performed by humans. Th at is all that there is to it. Th e fact that many
religious beliefs and behaviours refer to imagined entities or agents with
strange and mysterious properties is well known. However, they are imag-
ined entities and agents and it is as such that they can be studied: namely
as objects of the human imagination. Th is epistemological position may
disappoint some but there is nothing that can be done about these condi-
tions. Ever since the days of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) all that we can
talk about as humans is what and how things appear to us – not what they
really are “as such” in and of themselves. Now, objects may appear to our
minds without being ontologically existing material entities. One example:
of the ancient Chinese “celestial animals” it is only turtles that are objects
of zoology; the others: dragons, phoenixes and unicorns are not. But as
objects of thought, reverence and ritual observance they are real enough
– because they matter.
Th e materials covered in this exposition of religion as a feature of human
life and history consist of case studies and illustrations from a wide range
of the world’s religions, past and present. Th e choice of these cases and
illustrations refl ects both specifi c aspects of religion as well as important
and focal issues in the study of religion. Th eoretically, this book is based on
the recent cognitive science of religion, on dimensions in cultural, social
and moral psychology, on aspects of social anthropology and sociology,
and with inspirations from linguistics and semiotics. Th is composite theo-
retical and methodological “conglomerate” is necessary in order to give a
reasonably comprehensive coverage of “religion” – a topic of tremendous
complexity.
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