Studying Religion, Making It Sociological 27
stories of founding figures provide cohesion to a nation: If nothing else, people who
otherwise share little can sense an affinity for one another because they have read the
same authors and know the same books. In larger measure, though, the classic works
serve as a legitimate way of bringingnormative concernsinto a scholarly setting that
often pretends not to honor such concerns. Studying the poor can be justified in terms
of a Weberian analysis of social class, for instance, rather than having to acknowledge
that one actually cares about the poor.
As the classic works fade farther into the past, one of the challenges facing sociolo-
gists of religion is finding a language in which to express their normative concerns. For
many, concerns about racial oppression, gender inequality, and discrimination based
on sexual preference provide such a language. But such languages always require close
examination, extension, and reinvention. In the future, the greatest intellectual chal-
lenge posed by normative concerns is likely to be that of religious pluralism. Greater
diversity and more extensive interaction among members of religious communities will
necessitate confronting thorny questions about the correctness of particular religious
teachings and the survival of particular religious communities.
A BASIS FOR DISCIPLINARY INTEGRITY
Thus far, I have argued that studies of religion blend more easily with the theoretical
concerns of sociology as a discipline than is sometimes supposed, that there is con-
siderable room for methodological diversity, and that students of religion need not
leave their normative concerns at the door in order to do respectable sociology. But
if all this is the case, then the question arises: Isn’t the study of religion pretty easily
turned into an interdisciplinary affair? The answer to this question, I think, is to a large
extent, yes, and I will say more about that in a moment. But first it does seem to me
that disciplines such as sociology still matter and we need to be clear about why they
matter.
When I say that disciplines matter, I mean this in both an intellectual and a prag-
matic sense. Intellectually, they matter (or should matter) because they embody a corpus
of insights and understandings that cannot be readily found elsewhere; and pragmati-
cally, they matter (or should matter) because they exercise certain enforceable standards
of evaluation over the work of practitioners who identify with them. But what can the
basis of this intellectual and pragmatic “matter-ing” be? It cannot be, I have suggested,
that sociology is bending its efforts toward the construction of a distinctive theoretical
edifice that matters more than any of the substantive topics it addresses, and it cannot
be the deployment of a methodological apparatus that only its practitioners are skilled
in using. Bringing distinctive normative concerns – or avoiding all such concerns –
cannot be a basis for a disciplinary integrity, either.
The single defensible basis for a distinct approach to the study of religion that we
would call sociological has to be an arbitrary one: That the academic enterprise at
this stage in its development has become so vast and so complex that specialization
is a necessity. It is a necessity both for the production of good scholarly work and
for the evaluation of such work. The goal of scholarship, not only in research but
also in teaching, is surely to nurture “A” quality work over “B” quality work and to
encourage more “B” quality work than “C” quality work, and so on. But to do so requires
focusing one’s time and energy, learning a certain body of literature, and mastering an