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The Origin and Nature of Religion: A Critical Realist View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

Philip Gorski
Philip Gorski*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

There are few social scientists who have done as much scholarly research on religion as Christian Smith. Over the past three decades, he has interviewed hundreds of people, fielded numerous surveys, and written dozens of books. And in recent years, he has pushed beyond the boundaries of empirical social research into the neighboring domains of social theory, philosophy, and theology. Anyone who studies or cares about religion will want to know what he has to say about it.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 111 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 289 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2018 

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References

1 Smith, Christian, What is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, To Flourish or Destruct: A Personalist Theory of Human Goods, Motivations, Failure, and Evil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); idem, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012).

2 See Smith, Christian, The Emergence of Liberation Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

3 Amongst the best known of these works are Smith, Christian, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)Google Scholar, where Smith coined the widely cited concept of “moral therapeutic deism” to characterize the religious views of American teens; and American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4 The Critical Realist movement arose in the UK during the late 1970s and early 1980s and has recently gained a following within the US. For a general introduction, see Sayer, Andrew, Realism in Social Science (New York: Sage, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a collection of “classic” texts, see Critical Realism: Essential Readings (ed. Margaret Archer et al; New York: Routledge, 1998). For a theological application, see Wright, Andrew, Christianity and Critical Realism: Ambiguity, Truth and Theological Literacy (New York: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar. The philosophical cum sociological variant of critical realism arose later than, and independently of, the theological cum scientific variant developed by John Polkinghorne and others.

5 Riesebrodt, Martin, The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; idem, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979)Google Scholar; Chidester, David, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Nongbri, Brent, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Ibid., 158.

9 Ibid., 157.

10 Riesebrodt, Promise of Salvation, xi.

11 Ibid., 6.

12 Ibid., 2.

13 Ibid., xxi.

14 Ibid., 76.

15 In Smith's words, religion is “a complex of culturally prescribed practices that are based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers.” Smith, Religion, 3.

16 Smith, Flourish or Destruct, 181.

17 Smith, Religion, 5.

18 Ibid., 209.

19 Ibid., 204ff.

20 Ibid., 202

21 For the Critical Realist view of social emergence, see especially, Elder-Vass, Dave, The Causal Powers of Social Structures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Smith, Religion, 135ff.

23 Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar. Joas, Hans, Die Macht des Heiligen. Eine Alternative zur Geschichte der Entzauberung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017)Google Scholar.

24 Alexander, Jeffrey and Smith, Philip, “The Strong Program in Cultural Theory: Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics,” in Handbook of Sociological Theory (ed. Turner, Jonathan H.; New York: Springer, 2006) 135–50Google Scholar.

25 Stark, Rodney and Iannaccone, Laurence, “A Supply–Side Reinterpretation of the ‘Secularization’ of Europe,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 33.3 (1994) 230–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Barrett, Justin L., “Exploring the Natural Foundations of Religion,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4.1 (2000) 29–34Google Scholar.

27 Pinker, Steven, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar.

28 Smith, Religion, 233.

29 Ibid., 135ff.

30 Ibid., 93.

31 See Lamont, M. and Molnár, V., “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences,” Annual Review of Sociology 28.1 (2002) 167–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Gorski, P. S., “The Matter of Emergence: Material Artifacts and Social Structure” Qualitative Sociology 39.2 (2016) 211–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Gieryn, T. F., “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48.6 (1983) 781–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For an introduction, see Bourdieu, Pierre and Wacquant, Loïc J. D., An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

35 Goossaert, Vincent and Palmer, David A., The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, (Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar.