Handbook of the Sociology of Religion

(WallPaper) #1

Studying Religion, Making It Sociological 17


Such comments are frequent enough that graduate students lie awake at night,
pondering their futures as sociologists of religion, and wonder if they’ve made a big
mistake. Oh, well, they console themselves, maybe someday when I have tenure I
can do what I really want to do. They temporarily overlook the fact that more than
a few of their senior mentors have found the strain sufficiently great that they have
abandoned the field entirely, fleeing to presumably greener pastures in religious studies
departments, seminaries, or programs in American studies, Judaica, or the Middle East
(cf. Wentz 1999).
But undergraduates’ concerns, if not unique, are refreshingly candid. Graduate stu-
dents, by the time they have passed their theory and methods requirements and at-
tended a few faculty forums, are generally asking different questions, like “What kind
of recommendation letters does Professor X write?” or “Has anybody else analyzed
this data set yet?” In comparison, undergraduates (for all their labors in academe) still
have one foot firmly planted in the real world. They sometimes pick topics because
they are truly important and because they think these topics will make a difference to
how they and others will relate to their work, their families, and their communities.
Their questions about how to study religion and make it sociological have to be taken
seriously.
In this chapter, I want to consider why the study of religion so often appears to exist
in tension with the discipline of sociology. My argument suggests that the tension is
less serious than is often imagined to be; indeed, that it arises largely because of misun-
derstandings about theory, misunderstandings about method, and misunderstandings
about normative perspectives. Having considered each of these ways in which the so-
ciological study of religion is frequently misunderstood, I turn in the last part of the
chapter to a discussion of the basis for disciplinary integrity in sociology of religion
and of the possibilities for fruitful interdisciplinary exchange. But first it is necessary
to set aside two commonly expressed objections to the idea that the study of religion
and sociology can be easily reconciled.


OBJECTION #1: SOCIOLOGISTS THINK RELIGION IS STUPID


A more elaborate formulation of this objection goes as follows: Sociology, like other
social science disciplines, was born of the Enlightenment. Some of its founders, like
August Comte, believed that religion would gradually be replaced by philosophy,
which, in turn, would be replaced by science (include sociology). Other founders, such
as Karl Marx, believed that religion was an oppressive system that enlightened thinkers
(like himself) needed to debunk, while others found company in Emile Durkheim’s
atheism or in Max Weber’s much-quoted lament about being religiously unmusical. As
sociology developed, it largely accepted the proposition that the world would gradually
become less and less religious. Religion, therefore, might remain as a kind of backwash
among the unenlightened, but was not a subject to which any self-respecting academi-
cian would want to devote much time.
This characterization of the history of sociology is sometimes supported by com-
plaints about the state of sociology of religion within the larger discipline. Undergradu-
ates may notice that the professors in their other courses seldom include any reference
to religion or seem embarrassed if the subject arises and they may observe that courses
in organizations, stratification, family, and criminology are offered regularly, while

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