Finding Religion Project
Finding Religion is exploring the concepts and methods that scholars are currently using to understand religion in world affairs and promoting a conversation about the best practices for studying religion as a social and political force. After long neglecting religion as a topic – influenced by the widely held belief that secularism would make religion socially and politically irrelevant – social scientists have begun in recent decades to take religion more seriously as a legitimate focus of study. While much of the initial work on the subject suffered from a tendency to view religious traditions in overly general terms, treating them as systems of belief that are consistent, systematic, and organized around bounded, hierarchical, and coherent institutions, the best recent work has disaggregated religion, studying the many diverse elements and expressions that make up religions.
In this project, we are considering the best practices that social scientists are currently using to “find religion,” and the ways in which scholars are exploring the diverse manifestations of the phenomena we call “religion.” A non-exhaustive inventory of what constitutes religion includes systems of belief, individual and collective rituals, ethics, sacred texts and methods of exegesis, everyday beliefs and practices, governance structures, expert behavior, identities, artifacts, sites of worship, and activity such as pilgrimage, canonical texts, and charismatic leaders, all of which change over time. Religious organizations are internally heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory. Critical scholarship has demonstrated that “religion” as a category of analysis is itself entangled in law, politics, and economics, rather than being separate from other social institutions.
Given the diversity of institutions, beliefs, and practices that can be considered “religion,” this project explores how social scientists should approach religion as a category of analysis. We are seeking to understand what becomes visible when we study specific components of religion rather than assuming that the parts mirror the whole. At the same time, we consider what is rendered invisible by focusing only on specific aspects of religious traditions rather than considering religions as a whole. What does treating religion as discrete and separable from other aspects of social and political life occlude?