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ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT

“Why Social Scientists (and some journalists) Don’t Get Religion”

Christian Smith University of Notre Dame

November 16, 2014

MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Our next speaker, Christian Smith, is one of the leading sociologists in religion in the country today. Chris Smith is now at Notre Dame, but was formerly was at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He did his Ph.D. at Harvard, and he has written very important books, one called What is a person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up. He’s written on Evangelicals, he’s written on teenagers and religion. He has just finished a major study for the Templeton Foundation on “What is Generosity?” In January 2004, Professor Smith wrote a column called “Religiously Ignorant Journalists.” CHRISTIAN SMITH: Thank you, Mike. A few preliminary comments. I’m not going to talk about the fact “that” American social scientists don’t get religion, I’m just taking that for granted. We could talk about how or ways that may be later, but I’m just going to take that for granted and focus on why. I’m going to lay out 14 reasons, some big, some smaller, that I think help to explain why American social scientists don’t get religion. There are more than that, it’s more complicated. Is it inevitable that American social scientists don’t get religion? No, I don’t think it’s inevitable at all. It’s explainable by a specific set of historical ideological and institutional factors. Before I jump into those, however, just to tip my hat to what’s the connection between social scientists, as academics, and journalists, what you all are. Well, clearly both social scientists and journalists are knowledge class professionals. Journalists are products of American higher education, clearly have gone to college and maybe graduate school, et cetera, and are influenced by academia’s outlooks and its limits, not determined, but at least influenced; and academic findings and theories trickle down to the media more or less well, and then often trickle back up to academia. Academics actually rely a lot on what gets reported by some of you about what Pew said, so there are circular flows of information that are very interesting. So I’m also taking for granted

http://eppc.org/events/faith-angle-forum-november-2014/%23Smith

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Why Social Scientists (and some journalists) Don’t Get Religion”

Christian Smith November 2014

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that we understand there is sort of a complex relationship between being a journalist and being an academic.

What explains this? All right, starting with my own discipline of sociology, sociology from the very beginning has had a complicated, fundamentally oppositional relationship with religion, and by religion here I mean Protestant Christianity, liberal Protestantism especially, and this is similar with other social scientists.

What do I mean by this? Early in American sociology, before it was professionalized, the sort of amateur sociologists -- about half of them were religious people, clergy or sons of clergy, social gospel types, progressive liberal Protestant types, and then as American higher education professionalized, those sociologists who were less religious, who had positions not in churches but in universities, wanted to professionalize, and so in order to do that, they went through some standard professionalization processes, one of which was to identify and cast out anyone who could be defined as an amateur or a do-gooder, and so all the academic sociologists basically got together, professionalized, and threw out, in quite blatant terms, threw out on their rear ends the do-gooders from churches who were trying to do research on behalf of progressive civilization.

And so from that time onward, the academic profession of sociology has sort of cast itself discursively and structurally as a kind of a rival of religion; and if you go back when people are less careful about how they wrote and said things, it’s just amazing some of the discourse that went on about religion.

Religion, from the very beginning of my own discipline was The Other, the amateurs to sort of keep out, who were threats to the profession. These long, deep cultural ways of thinking and oppositions are consequential over time.

Another huge factor is the intellectually stultifying legacy of secularization theory. It was doxic. It wasn’t debated. It was taken obviously for granted in the social sciences and much more broadly in fact, that the more modern society becomes, the less religious it will become, that religion withers in modern societies, it always will wither, and it’s probably a good thing that it will wither, we’re glad that that’s going to happen.



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So it combined both a descriptive and a normative element in various contexts that modern societies are places where religion will finally go away. And this was literally orthodoxy in academia until the 1980s. I mean, it has deep roots and all of the major social theorists had one version or another of this. Durkheim would have said we will have a modern religion of the individual, so there will be a quasi-religion, but it will be a religion of the individual. But Weber and Marx and Freud and everyone else basically took this for granted, that modern societies will not be religious.

And so I’ve talked with lots of older scholars who went through graduate school in the ’50s and were consistently told by their advisors, “You don’t want to study religion. That’s like studying last year’s newspaper. That’s like studying the dinosaur. Why would you want to do that?” So this whole generation or two of scholars who were sort of turned away from studying this and those that eventually did study it had to really fight on their own and push back against everyone who was mentoring them that this was what they wanted to do.

So basically this theory, secularization theory, deterred serious attention to religion and theoretical reflection about religion and analytical pondering about religion all the way into -- you know, for the entire 20th century up into basically the 1980s. So the field, so to speak, of thinking intelligently about religion was just basically atrophied because there was this background presupposition running that no one even questioned that religion is not going to be in modern society. We are still in academia trying to catch up, even now intellectually, theoretically, how to make sense of religion because of this sort of long delay in thinking about it well.

Then in sociology, after we realized, well, the secularization theory may be wrong, then we spent 15 or 20 years taking a rational choice, sort of economics approach, to thinking about religion, which turned out to be pretty fruitless in the end, too. So we’ve gone down a lot of rabbit trails, and only now I think are we starting to really think more intelligently about religion in the social sciences. And sociologists should have been on the forefront of that. Compared to political science, sociology is positively enlightened about religion; in some disciplines, it’s just not cared about hardly at all, it’s a very small group of people.

Now, why was it in the 1980s that academics finally realized they couldn’t keep ignoring religion? It’s not because they had developed an enlightened native interest in religion,



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they didn’t finally say, “Oh, wow, actually this is cool, and it’s probably going to be around in our lifetime, so let’s really try to understand this.” It was nothing like that at all, it was a very much begrudging engagement with religion through external impositions onto academia by important events in the world. Academics generally did not have an internal enlightenment where they said, “Let’s figure out religion, we’re behind,” but it was this sort of like, “Ugh, religion, well, I guess we have to figure out this business.”

It was a whole set of things starting in the ’70s and really ramping up in the ’80s forced religion on social science, everything from the so-called religious right -- Jerry Falwell, of course, was an abomination to most social scientists. And so a lot of early social science reaction to religion in the public sphere was moral outrage, I mean, it was really expressed by, “How could this be happening? I can’t believe these Neanderthals still exist in the world,” kind of reaction. But the Iranian revolution, the Catholic nature or dimensions of solidarity in Poland, John Paul II and communism, liberation theology in Latin America, people like Desmond Tutu, the strong role of churches and religious leaders in South Africa, lots of other leading all the way up to -- and not just political, but also realizing religion is growing quite quickly in China. I mean, that’s not necessarily immediately a political event, but just religion not only not going away, but communism was unable to snuff it out; and in some places it’s actually growing, like in South Korea, where it’s “not supposed to.” So a lot of it has been imposed, not welcomed, not intellectually enthusiastic about it, but, “Ugh, I guess it’s not going to go away,” sort of attitude.

The apparent resurgence of public religion around the world -- and I put “apparent” in parentheses because a way this is often talked about in public discourse is there was a religious resurgence in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there was a resurgence of religion, which suggests somehow that religion had gone away, that modernization almost worked, that secularization almost happened, and then we couldn’t quite sweep it all out the back door and now everybody is coming back in. Of course, the reality, in retrospect, is religion was always around, people were always religious, it may have gone through different phases of relative quiet, and the Cold War had to do with some dimensions of that and so on, but so that’s why I put “apparent” in parentheses and “resurgence” in quotation marks.



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The apparent resurgence of public religions around the world transpired when American social scientists were focused primarily on theories and explanations that couldn’t properly account for religion. This is not intentional, but it just so happens that in the ’70s and ’80s American social science was possessed by a set of theories that just were not well suited to make sense of religion, they were very much focused on structural causes of things, economic interests, power, state-centered theory, bringing the state back in, background presumptions of materialism, sort of the Hobbesian view of how the world works, and this was on the ascendancy, this is what was getting all of the attention.

And so if you try to say, “Well, what’s religion? How does religion fit into this?” it was extremely easy, given the theoretical preoccupations of social science at the time, to ignore or just reduce religion. You could just pretend it didn’t exist, but if you had to pretend it exists, you could say, well, this is really just epiphenomenal fluff of something else that’s more real or more fundamental, it’s not really the thing in and of itself that the believers claim that it is.

So that also meant that right when social science should have been realizing, “wait a minute, we’ve got to get this right,” very few of the theoretical preoccupations set up social scientists cognitively to make good sense of what religion is and how it operates.

The same is true that the apparent resurgence of public religions around the world transpired when sociology of religion, people in my own field, had been for a very long time primarily focused on denominational religion in the U.S. That is, that small sect of academics who did study religion, sociologists of religion, tended to look at questions of, “Why are conservative churches growing?” and, “The mainline is in decline,” and, “What was the effect of Vatican II on the Catholic Church?” and et cetera, et cetera, very much focused on U.S. religion, not global, not world religions. This reflects a more broad problem in lots of academia of what we might call methodological nationalism; that is, somehow thinking in terms of the boundaries of nation states as the unit of the religious thing to study rather than something transnational or global or tradition based or something more complicated than that.

Part of this is the completely unintended influence by the fact that a great deal of the funding for American social scientific study of religion came from Lilly Endowment Incorporated, in Indianapolis. They helped keep the study of religion alive basically, but



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in their charter they only fund studies of American religion, they do not study anything outside the United States. Of course, they’re perfectly allowed to do that, but the fact is that the dominant funder of religious research said it’s got to be in America, in the United States, helped to contribute unintentionally to this larger kind of academic parochialism.

So when it was time for social science -- even when it was way too late for social scientists to be realizing we need to understand religion better, we need to get religion, most of what people had been theorizing and thinking was completely about the United States, and running in the background of that was a kind of normative Evangelical Protestant model, namely, well, religion is something that you have these set of beliefs, and the beliefs matter a lot, and you have to go to church for worship once a week sort of thing, which, of course, some religions are like that and some aren’t. But there is even a lack of awareness, wait a minute, we’re assuming a particular model of religion without even reflecting on it that’s just not going to be the case around -- and that takes a long time to lose those presuppositions and retool for the kind of world that we actually live in.

The apparent resurgence of public religion around the world also transpired at a time when much of sociology of religion had been especially preoccupied with the study of cults, and this is mostly because in the ’60s and ’70s counterculture lots of middle and upper middle-class parents were worried that a cult was going to nab their kid from the streets of Berkeley and brainwash them and turn them into who knows what, and somehow that -- and so sociologists of religion seized on that, “People care what we’re doing! Let’s learn about cults!” And I’m not denigrating the study of new religious movements, but the study of cults is a very narrow, narrow piece of everything that’s significant to understand about religions broadly and all of their social, economic, and political importance, and this preoccupied a lot of sociology of religion through the ’70s.

So again if you realize in the ’80s, we need to understand this better, what kind of tools do you have in your toolkit to do that well? Well, we didn’t have a lot, there just wasn’t a lot intellectually and theoretically. Part of what was problematic about the study of cults is it focused on sort of their particular microdynamics like brainwashing. Does brainwashing happen? And again that’s very interesting, but that’s only a miniscule piece of what needs to be understood about religion and not more macro facts and processes at a global level.



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Another very important factor is that mainstream American social scientists are relatively less personally religious than the average American. Academics are generally, social scientists are, too, which often contributes to disciplines that they’re in not taking religion seriously in their scholarship. I mean, part of it is just the very gut level existential sense of, “Well, this doesn’t matter to me, I don’t give a damn about this, so how could it matter to anybody?” It’s that people won’t actually say it in those words, but there is sort of this background sense this can’t possibly really matter -- and this connects to some things we talked about this morning -- if there is something religious going on, it must really be about something else, so let’s get down to what it’s “really” about -- economics or power or something else, something hard and real -- and that’s a very easy, natural default position for somebody who isn’t personally religious.

And, just so you know, my own view is people who are not religious at all and people who are totally religious and everything in between can study religion social scientifically very well, they just have to be aware of who they are, what their biases are, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. This has to be self-reflexivity, but there is no privileging necessarily one way or another here.

Also, academics love to be experts in what they’re talking about. They never want to be shown or seen to not understand something or to have missed something important. And so when it comes to religion, if they are not personally religious, that is, they have not accumulated enough natural at ease religious capital that they know what words mean, that they know what’s going on in religious words, that they know symbolism, that they religious texts and their references, if they don’t have that kind of religious capital-- here I am getting a little psychological, but I think it’s the case -- they feel insecure, and so they just kind of naturally avoid, because they don’t want to say something dumb, they don’t want to be asked a question they can’t answer, et cetera, so that very easily turns into, “That’s just something I don’t study.”

You can get away with saying, “That’s not something I study,” more or less on certain things. You can even get away with saying, “I don’t study gender.” I mean, if somebody says, “What’s the -- there must be a gender story in what you’re doing here,” that’s harder to say, “I don’t study gender,” because you’re really not paying attention to something that really matters, but you can easily say, “I just don’t study religion,” and get away with that.



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Also, if somebody who doesn’t really get religion existentially does decide to study it, they’re much more likely to misinterpret their findings to sort of say, “Well, here is what it really is about.” They don’t have the depth of familiarity with the subject matter that’s necessary to interpret data properly.

There is also a common double-standard suspicion of religious scholars, and by that I mean the following. It’s almost knee-jerk reaction by very many social scientists, if they find out that you are a person of religious faith and you study religion, that you are suspect in whatever you’re doing and have to say because you must have some grossly biasing interest in this. I mean, it’s hard for them to imagine that you’re not out to promote something or you’re giving something the benefit of the doubt.

What rarely gets reflected upon is that, as human beings, we scholars are all the particularities that we are, and nobody ever says, “Well, if you’re a woman, isn’t that biasing you for studying women’s studies?” or, “If you’re African American, how can you be in an Afro-American studies department?” So I don’t mean to make light of this, these are challenging and difficult things, but my point is that religion is singled out as you’re suspect. If you’re not a secularist studying religion, you probably are deeply biased about this.

And so this gets known without having to be talked too much about, and so, people will have to keep their personal religious faith quiet, keep it in the closet, or have to engage in all these apologetics, or get in arguments with your colleagues, “Well, you’re Asian. Why are you studying Asia?” you know, I mean, which nobody wants to go there.

And sometimes there is outright activist atheist prejudice and animosity. I mean, there is a certain amount of this in the academy that’s just outraged that somebody could have a religious commitment, there is something deeply wrong with them, and they need to be attacked and marginalized.

So that’s not the main dynamic here, most of the dynamics are much more subtle, but there is this whole range of dynamics that the fact that the academics are less personally religious, disadvantages them/us at understanding and getting religion really well in our scholarship.



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Meanwhile, I just wrote a book called The Sacred Project of American Sociology, which suggests my entire discipline is a sacred project. We have a sacred vision of the world we want to promote, and that’s everything -- the vast majority of us are explicitly committed to that even if we don’t understand that, or deny it, and misrecognize it. So I am persona non grata with most of my colleagues in sociology anymore because I’m calling them out on how deeply committed -- and here I mean sacred, not religious, sacred in the Durkheimian sense. But my point here is to say the layers of complexity of what I would call spiritual and sacred commitments among academics, all woven in and through deep secularity in certain sectors and so on, is very complex and interesting. So another way to put this is if American sociology was just telling you the facts, it would be even more boring than it is, and we wouldn’t recruit any majors. So there is an energy, there is a progressive change-the-world energy that’s part of the DNA of my discipline that people are just sold out to so much and they don’t even realize it. It’s literally the discipline is a sacred project even if people are not especially religious.

Okay, shifting gears to another dimension of this. Most standard social science methodological tools reflect assumptions and treatments of religion that are thin, skewed, and misleading, and are serious obstacles to understanding and explaining real complex religious phenomena. The tools we use methodologically, analytically, to make measurements, for example, are just not adequate for the job. A lot of them are inherited, a lot of them are inadequate, and so what they do is they turn up nonfindings, and then it appears, religion doesn’t matter, you didn’t find anything, when the problem is not that religion doesn’t matter in the real world, the problem is the tools we have to do that aren’t good enough to measure and assess things well.

So for a very simple example, for the longest time most social surveys would have one or maybe two religion questions, and it would be something as pathetic as, “Are you Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, or other?” Well, we all know, I mean, those are not the relevant dividing lines in any of these traditions when it comes to many things -- political, social attitudes, and so on -- and so if that’s all you ask, then you run an analysis and find, well, there’s no difference between any of these religions, see, religion doesn’t matter. That’s an artifact of the method. It’s an academic misconstruction of reality that’s our fault, not the way the real world is.



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More recently, things have become more sophisticated, but most surveys still only ask a religious service attendance question, maybe a Bible view’s question, and again here you can see that there is sort of still an Evangelical Protestant normative thing running in the background of a lot of questions.

So and in and through all this, there is generally a failure to take the complexities of qualitative research seriously and to work hard at conceptualization; that is, before we start asking for data, to conceptualize, what are we even talking about? what is this thing that we’re talking about? what are the crucial dimensions of it? and so on.

More generally, the dominant philosophical methodological approach and most social scientists, what I call positivist empiricism, debilitates our ability to make good sense of religion. The idea of positivist empiricism is that the social sciences ought to mimic the natural sciences, that there is a unity of type of science that goes on here, that it’s limited to direct observables, which is empiricism, and tends to run statistical quasi-experiments --an explanation takes the form “If A, then B,” or, “If more of A, then more or less of B,” sort of a Humean constant conjunction theory of causation, which is deeply problematic. This is not a good way to understand religion for the most part. It’s possible to understand certain dimensions of religion with this dominant approach to things, but it’s not well suited to the subject matter. Aristotle said the nature of the science needs to be calibrated to the thing it’s studying and not the other way around. We too often have this idea, here is what Real Science is, now let me go out to the world and impose it on the world, and then we don’t understand religion adequately because we have the wrong idea of what science is.

There are deep, deep philosophical groundings for where we are today that go all the way back at least to late Medieval nominalism. So this stuff is being set up philosophically for a long time, all the way back from William of Ockham, Kant, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and others who laid a groundwork that by the time you traverse that path of intellectual thinking, you’re at a place where it is hard to make sense of religion.

CHRISTIAN SMITH: The social scientific study of religion in the U.S. has been and remains somewhat institutionally isolated. So now I’m switching to an organizational explanation, that as it developed in a course across the 20th century, those social scientists who studied religion formed their own organizations, which sounds like a great thing, they’re



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institutionalizing what they’re doing, but what they did is they formed their own organizations that tended to then become isolated from the mainstream. So we have the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Religious Research Association, and so on. They all have their own specialty journals. The mainstream in sociology discipline, professional association, the American Sociological Association, didn’t found a religion section until 1995. So it’s very recent that religion even got into the mainstream organization. Everyone else was studying everything else, religion was sort of separated off out there in its own organizations.

Part of this was that a lot of mid-20th century sociology of religion was serving religious organizations directly. They were doing research for the United Methodist Church or whoever to sort of collect statistics, find out what was going on, and that kind of removed them from the mainstream of sociology.

So all of this unintentionally isolated the study of religion and suggested to those who were not part of these organizations religion is being taken care of by someone else, we’ve got that covered, those people over there are doing it, I don’t need to think about it, I don’t need to worry about it.

Another unexpected or ironic version of this organizationally is that this isolation has been reinforced through the creation and expansion of departments of religious studies. So since the second half of the 20th century, new departments or reworked departments that were mostly called religious studies were sort of developed, expanded, a lot of them grew out of universities’ theology departments or semi-Christian religion departments, and they have their different backgrounds, but there was an attempt to get a more serious, more professional study of religion as a serious topic, which sounds good, it sounds like that should help our understanding in the study of religion, but basically it had this unintended consequence of saying, “Oh, religion is a subject matter, that department, that’s what they study. We don’t study it.”

So instead of understanding religion as infused in and through everything -- there’s economic, political, whatever you study, psychology--religion was sort of cordoned off, division of labor, the religious studies people have got that, so we don’t need to hire any people that study religion in our departments. I don’t think anybody intended that. It’s



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an unfortunate consequence of trying to give the study of religion recognition, but this organizational dynamic had that consequence.

I also think it’s very interesting culturally that it fits nicely against the background liberal assumption that religion is one different sector of society; that is, differentiation, religion gets defined as, that’s the religious sector of society, it’s different from military, economics, politics, family, education, et cetera, and so there’s a department that will study that over there rather than understanding religion as involved in most everything or at least everybody else needs to have some basic familiarity with religion just like they need to do with social class and so on.

A couple last points. The study of religion occupies the lower end of disciplinary status hierarchies in every social science discipline. It’s not something people are aspiring to that’s the most prestigious, that’s the most well regarded. In any discipline, it’s not considered central or important. When I first showed up at UNC Chapel Hill early in my career, I was actually hired as a Latin Americanist, but I started being interested in the study of religion more and more, and I was told over and over by more senior people in my department, “Don’t do that,” “You don’t want to do that,” “That’s not going to be good for your career,” “Avoid that,” and I didn’t take that advice, happily, but there is this sense, “Why would you study this trivial marginal thing, religion?”

So consequently, there are many fewer religion faculty recruited or religion courses offered, even though, ironically, there is very strong demand among undergraduate students, and, in some cases, graduate students, they want to know about religion. They know religion matters, they’ve read about it in the news, they want to take courses, they want to better understand it, but the faculty in many social science departments just don’t think that’s going to help their status, the ranking of their departments, to hire in religion, they need to hire somewhere else, and so the sort of undergraduate demand for this topic is essentially ignored for reasons of internal status considerations: What’s a more prestigious subfield to hire in? Religion isn’t going to win out on that competition.

So this then becomes an institutionally reproduced self-fulfilling prophecy. Religion doesn’t have all that much status, so we don’t want to train people in this, we don’t want to offer courses, we don’t want to recruit people, and so religion remains in these



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institutional processes at the same low level of status that it has, less investment in quality.

Two more explanations. The category of “the secular” or being secular has until very recently been treated essentially as the natural universal automatic default setting of rational humanity, like that’s just where you would be if you were normal. So religion is the problem, not just maybe we don’t like religion, but maybe at a purely intellectual level the question is: Why would people be religious? That’s something that’s got to be explained. Whereas the secularist, well, of course, that’s just obvious.

Recently a whole bunch of writers have been observing, wait a minute, there isn’t even The Secular as a category. We have lots of secularisms, there are just as many versions of secularisms as there are like different kind of religions, and they’re all historically located, they’re post some religious tradition, Christendom or something else, and so the secular has only very recently become now a problematic object of study, like, well, this deserves to be studied, too.

So that to me is very revealing, that things secular would just be taken to be the natural automatic universal default, of course, and then religion is the puzzle, shows this kind of self-privileged unproblematic lack of self-reflexivity about where everybody is. So even people who would be sort of post-modern, that everyone just has their own tribal narrative or whatever, wouldn’t realize, oh, well, the same thing with secularism, too. I think this privileging of the secular is automatic and natural feeds into my larger story.

Finally, understanding religion well is hampered by a larger failure in social science -- and I would say American academia broadly -- to think broadly and to ask big questions, and all of that is reinforced by standard institutional structures and practices. What I mean by that is, over the course of the 20th century, of course, we’ve had a massive, massive growth of knowledge, of scientific knowledge, and that’s just produced massive hyperspecialization, so if somebody wants to be competent, they have to master less and less and less subject matter, and the university is not set up to think about linkages between all those pieces, and so what we call the university, the sort of singular coherence of knowledge, is, in fact, fragmented up -- and this is nothing new, people have been making this critique for decades -- fragmented up into a chaos-university or a multi-university or something -- it certainly isn’t “uni.”



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Faculty, of course, who are being inducted into this system are focused on their own tenure, their own expertise, their own careers. Graduate students who are being trained, increasingly in a context where it’s getting more and more intense, are being rushed through programs. You have 5 years of funding and you better have a number of publications in those 5 years, and so this all is tending to produce technicians rather than intellectuals, not people who take the time to read history and to read philosophy and to think how the pieces connect together, but who know little narrow bits that they can get articles published on that so they can get a job.

And against the largest background here I would say is something like a broader loss of faith by academia itself, and by those outside of academia, in academia’s larger authority and capacity to ask and answer life’s big questions. This is not the 19th century Presbyterian college where everything hangs together and the president will give a capstone course to make it all make sense. There is no in loco parentis, there is no responsibility for anything, it’s that, “We’re a research university, we’re ranked 15th,” whatever that story is.

And so the idea -- and there is this is false humility, like who knows if there is a true good even? I don’t want to impose my vision of The Good Life on my students, so this whole avoidance of anything of real big human significance.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t study and understand religion unless you’re like the big picture, big questions; you can, it’s possible, even within the current framework, but I do think that academia’s loss of faith in itself and the society’s loss of faith in academia’s ability to take and to ask about, how does this all hang together? What are human beings really like? What is our condition? What’s going on with history? This pulling away from those kind of questions undermines an intellectual interest in understanding religion well.

So for those reasons and many others that I haven’t talked about, the bottom line when you put all this together and all these factors are interactive and historically cumulative and so on, what we have is most social science academics, even today, even in the world that we live in, even after decades of obvious in-your-face religion is really huge in the world still, still don’t get religion adequately.



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EMMA GREEN, The Atlantic: So you’ve laid out 14 factors that particularly relate to academia, and I think insofar as academia is one segment of the public sphere, I think there is another access point, which is the gray zone that’s presented by pluralism. When you have a pluralistic society and you have lots of different people with fundamentally different world views trying to live both in sort of a political sphere together but also just in day-to-day life together, there are a lot of tension points. How do you think academia navigates that? And then also how do you even figure that out in the public sphere generally when that’s just such a fundamental and intractable part of living in a pluralistic society? CHRISTIAN SMITH: A good society is not one that pushes toward uniformity but a community of communities, and each community is committed to accepting at some level the integrity of communities that are different from themselves and even honoring them in some sense. So from that point of view, which I know is not necessarily widely shared, there is a certain kind of honoring of the other that’s necessary by better knowing where they’re coming from…it presumes people are not fundamentally irrational, that people have good reasons for what they do and that they’re worth understanding. And so it seems to me that higher education should be the sphere where that is modeled, where that is practiced. Anthropologists can say you have to get into the shoes of the natives, whatever, you have to learn critical perspectives, see things from multiple points of view. I think in higher education we should be modeling, showing our students, if nowhere else, here is how you learn about something you don’t know about and maybe don’t like, here is how you have a disagreement that doesn’t end in a fistfight.

So that’s kind of a normative response, that this is part of academia’s calling, is to show how pluralism can work, because we are not stuck with, “What’s the public policy going to be?” we’re just trying to figure out, “What do people believe and what are their consequences?” If we can’t do it at that level, how are we going to do it as a society at a policy level?

EMMA GREEN: If you believe that religion should be normatively a public enterprise, it should be admissible into the public sphere, it should be part of your reasoning for why



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you believe a certain thing or why a law should be passed or whatever, and then if you don’t believe that, then isn’t that kind of just fundamentally at odds?

CHRISTIAN SMITH: I have an agonistic view of the advance of human knowledge. It comes through struggle and disagreement and conflict, but it only comes when a conflict is virtuous conflict and not destructive conflict. That’s a huge problem in our culture in society today, what you’re discussing. I think it’s partly the job of my people in academia to be able to overcome that. MATT LEWIS, Daily Caller: To what degree are there really different, you know, terminology, and are we really speaking different languages? And if so, it seems like that’s the kind of thing that journalists and academics ought to, even if they don’t believe, take the time to know enough about the different unique language. CHRISTIAN SMITH: Yes, that’s exactly what’s needed. To pull off the kind of good society I have in mind requires not just coexisting, it requires proactively learning how to communicate with the other in a respectful, if not necessarily affirming, a respectful open way. That’s a kind of a virtue that’s necessary to be learned, and if we can’t do that, then I don’t know how we can carry on in a pluralistic society. ANDY FERGUSON, Weekly Standard: One [question] is your use of the sacred project of sociology. I was wondering if you could explain what the object of that project is, what the goals are. And then you talked about positivist empiricism as what people think of as social science. But isn’t that true? I mean, if you take away the empiricism, the need to measure things, the need for statistical manipulation, all the things that people think of when they think of social science, you’re not really doing science anymore and you’re off into the humanities in some way. CHRISTIAN SMITH: So the first question, what is sociology’s sacred project? I don’t have memorized my very carefully written long sentence of this, but it’s basically that every autonomous individual human being will be free to live however they want with whatever resources they need to do that without any social constraints. And the irony for me is it’s completely sociologically naive. My grief with it is not that sociology has a moral commitment, that’s fine with me, or that sociologists do; my grief with it is that it’s almost



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total in the discipline, and people that don’t go along with that end up being marginalized, if not persecuted actually. The answer to the second question is I distinguish between empiricism and being empirical. Of course, the social sciences, like every science, is empirical, meaning it makes arguments with reference to evidence, observable evidence. Empiricism is a philosophical commitment that all reliable human knowledge must be grounded in or must be drawn from conclusions based on directly observable evidence, and I don’t think actually that’s how real science itself operates.

So there’s a difference between being a positivist and a realist. I’m a critical realist, not a positivist. And so once we lock ourselves into positivist empiricism, religion becomes really hard to make sense of in a profound way. If we become realists and admit nonobservables to the realm of things that we’re trying to understand and theorize, then suddenly the world opens up and we can understand it scientifically much better, and that’s what we end up doing anyway because reality imposes itself upon us despite our philosophies of science.

ROBERT DRAPER, New York Times Magazine: You point out that it should be the aim of scholars to belabor the big questions about why, where journalists are supposed to labor over smaller things. And so I wonder what the failures are in your view that pertain to journalists in terms of what we get or what we don’t get about religion. CHRISTIAN SMITH: A lot of journalists who I’ve had interactions with, and I’ve had a fair bit, just don’t have enough like basic fundamental understanding about religions to know what they’re talking about, and they just don’t have the background. There isn’t a religion beat where they have been given the resources to master the knowledge to be able to make sense of something themselves, and so they call people like me and others and say, “I don’t really understand this at all. I don’t have time to read anything. Either spend 2 hours educating me on the phone or --,” which really literally, “or give me a couple of quotes that will help me out because my deadline is very soon.” And that’s even with a lot of journalists who care about religion and think it matters and are writing on it.



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But at the same time, there are spheres of interest that journalists write about which you must know a lot more about. So there is unevenness in what a journalist is expected to know as background to write a competent story, and religion, I think, in my experience, it seems to fall on the side of you can start from not knowing much and write up, in part because religion often gets framed in the news as not serious politics, economics, development, it’s framed in the lifestyle section or it’s just sort of human interesty stuff like, “Isn’t it nice that there is a pastor in the local community doing X?” And that would seem to require less substantive knowledge of what one is writing about than if one is covering the Supreme Court or the Pentagon, I’m guessing. DAVID GREGORY: I think in political reporting often it’s darker, which is, here is a particular religious view of a candidate, and therefore if we assert that and understand that, we’re going to get a window into a policy view, a political view, what they will do with that faith to the country based on that faith. ELLIOTT ABRAMS, Council on Foreign Relations: There is a subculture of universities that are religious. In those places which are willfully religious, or describe themself, is there a subculture of sociology of religion that is different from what you describe? What goes on in sociology departments there? CHRISTIAN SMITH: The answer is generally not. What the Evangelical colleges are very good at are interrogating their disciplines from their faith perspectives and saying, “What is our discipline presupposing? What are its assumptions about what human motivations are?” And so they help their students think critically about the disciplines, which is a really, really good and important service, and that’s benefited me a lot to have enjoyed that as an undergraduate. But the Evangelical schools are generally not knowledge producers, they’re not research colleges, so to speak, they’re not at the forefront in publishing in journals in Oxford and Cambridge, and so they’re more functioned to consume and mediate to students how to think Christianly or whateverly about what they’re learning, which is important, but it doesn’t really make a causal intervention into the kind of dynamics I’m talking about.



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Secondly, many of these institutions are concerned with their own relative status and acceptance in higher education, and Evangelicals both thrive on being outsiders but also desperately want to be affirmed and accepted and not be irrelevant.

Finally, who teaches at these places? Even if they’re the most theologically sophisticated, they have been put through 5 to 10 years of graduate school in the standard programs, where they have been very powerfully formed into mainstream of their disciplines. So there are very powerful converging institutional forces that keep alternatives from becoming too significant.

SARAH PULLIAM BAILEY, Religion News Service: Do you think journalists should specialize in religion or should it be folded into other fields like politics, business, et cetera? Should religion be covered less about, “What does the Vatican say?” and more about, “How is Catholic thinking shaping attitudes about contraception and other issues?” CHRISTIAN SMITH: You might say scarcity prevents this, but in principle, I would say both/and. In academia we need both dedicated sociologists of religion, but we need people that study everything else to have some basic familiarity with religion so that if it comes up in what they’re studying, they’re not completely blind to it, they at least know, oh, now I need to pay attention to this and go ask somebody else who does know. So it’s neither we should have specialists and let them cover it or everyone needs to know everything; we need some of both. NAPP NAZWORTH,Christian Post: So there are a few religious people in the social sciences because they’re not joining or because they’re being kept out? And depending on your answer, what would it take to change that? CHRISTIAN SMITH: I think it’s a complex of multiple dynamics at work that produce fewer. There are self-selection effects; that is, a fundamentalist-leaning Evangelical Protestant is not going to take a couple sociology classes and saying, “This is what I want to do.” It’s just not going to resonate with sort of their vision of things, and so they will select themselves out.



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Sociology admissions committees and all sorts of processes along the way will also select on people who are -- I mean, this is basic homophily, people like being around people that are like them, and so there are processes of selecting out strange religious people out of academia and departments and so on, and that can be blatant and it could be very subtle. It doesn’t always happen. I mean, if somebody is a good mainline Protestant, keep it to themself, et cetera, there’s no problem. Or if somebody is the token Muslim scholar, you know, and they’re Muslim, as long as they don’t cross certain lines, it’s sort of like, “Yeah, that affirms we’re diversity-affirming people here, we’re really open.” So it’s complex the way it actually plays out, but I think self-selection processes and institutional selection processes that continue to reproduce institutionally the relative secularity of.

SCOTT WILSON, Washington Post: So two quick things. The first, what ideally is the right way to teach religion in the academy? And the other thing is, you go to Europe and people think the Americans are crazy religious people and that the politicians in our country publicly have to affirm their faith. George Bush did. Barack Obama did. How is the country still so religious given what you’re describing in the academy? CHRISTIAN SMITH: Peter Berger had this statement. “If Sweden is the least religious nation on the face of the earth and India is the most religious nation, the United States is a population of Indians ruled by Swedes.” And so what that does is it makes the elites feel threatened. They’re awash in a sea of faith. If they don’t defend their university and its secularity tooth and nail, that they’ll be overrun by hillbillies. And vice versa, if you’re an ordinary person, the elites are these liberal secular, da, da, da, and it’s not absolutely untrue on both sides, it’s just that it becomes this crazy dynamic of paranoia on both sides that actually reinforces the identity and the commitment and solidarity of each group of people in relation to the other through this sort of hostility othering. Evangelicals love to feel threatened. Well, they don’t love it, but it helps them, and so therefore they love it. It gives them their energy to feel like if we don’t get mobilized now, you know, we’re in trouble. And I know -- I mean, I’ve heard academics in faculty meetings say essentially the same thing, “I came to this university because it’s a state university. What the hell are you bringing anybody talking about anything religious



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here?” et cetera. So that’s partly a mutually reinforcing dynamic that keeps each side antagonistic to the other and then sort of vibrant. Your observation about Europe, I agree with that, but I also think it’s more complicated. So, for example, in time I’ve spent in England, and in some ways, religion is much more a relaxed natural part of public life than it ever could possibly be here. I was surprised at how comfortable many in higher education in England they were with, yeah, religion is in and through everything, whereas here we’re much more sort of rigid and boundary drawing. Religion in Europe sort of functions like a public utility, and in the United States it functions like a private enterprise, and that has consequences for its role or position or cultural status in public life.

The first thing is how to study religion. I mean, what I’m asking for minimally, I’m not asking for the confessional study of religion or preaching of religion, I just think religion should be understood as part of the human world, heritage, tradition, dynamics of social life just like everything else, and so that could be studied secularly in principle, and just because of the basic mission of what social science is, we want to understand the world and how it works. Religion needs to be accounted for in proportion to how important it is, and that’s what I’m not seeing being done.

MICHAEL PAULSON, New York Times: So what is a judge? Was secularization theory false or was it just premature and blinding? And if it was wrong, what are we seeing with the rise of the “Nones,” the decline of denominations, the kind of removal of religion from American public life? CHRISTIAN SMITH: The secularization theory wasn’t absolutely false. The problem with it is that it compacted together a whole set of ways in which religion might weaken or decline or recede, and since then we’ve figured out you have to disaggregate all these different meanings and give them different names. So there’s a difference between the idea that modern man won’t be able to believe things. That’s the plausibility of religious beliefs. That’s one thing. Demystification.



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Another thing is, is religion differentiated from other spheres of life? Is religion sort of an institutional sector of life that’s different from what the military is doing and what psychiatry is doing and what education is doing?

Another question is whether religion gets privatized. That is, people still believe the same things, but they have to keep it personal to themselves, it’s not something that they bring out into the open in public settings.

So these are all different ways that religion’s authority or presence or plausibility could be reduced or enlarged. The original secularization theory was not thought through so much, it was just assumed all these things will decline.

If what we mean by secularization is institutional differentiation, clearly modernity is secularizing; I mean, religion is not thought of as sort of having an influence in all these different spheres of society, it’s sort of compressed down into one sphere of society. Some religious people say that’s great, that’s the best thing that ever happened to religion. They’re actually more authentic themselves now that they don’t have their hands in politics as much and the military and education and trying to run the world, now they can focus on what religion is really about. That’s one vision of that. Modernity has actually been constructively refining, fire for religious traditions.

The question as to whether people can no longer believe things religious is clearly false. Many people, including many well-educated, smart people, still have religious beliefs. There are certain institutional sectors where religious unbelief function as carriers of that, and higher education is one of them.

SHADI HAMID, Brookings Institution: I’m curious just to hear more of your thoughts on if we, as social scientists, want to or need to make causal inferences, that’s where I think it becomes more challenging. How do we attribute causality to feelings effectively? And how do you isolate the religious from the political when in the minds of the believer the two are inextricably intertwined? I would be curious how we make sense of how the political and religious interact, and should we even be considering them as discrete categories? I mean, perhaps is that a problem in and of itself, the fact that we speak of religious and political or religious and secular, assuming that they can be differentiated between?



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CHRISTIAN SMITH: On the last point, I think it’s helpful for moderns to realize that while we take for granted that as religion has been differentiated and separated from politics and education and the military is a pretty recent human social invention, that for most of human history, religion was inextricably wound up in empire, pharaoh, whatever it would have been, the very idea that religion was somehow this separable thing would not have made any sense, and so that’s sort of the human social default, is this religion is baked into lots of things, and the idea of drawing a line doesn’t even make sense even if it were possible. Now, because we are moderns, we do try to separate out how much of this is just economic interest versus religious commitment. Yeah, those things are incredibly hard because they interact in ways that the subjects, the actors, themselves don’t even know. They can’t even sort out themselves where those lines and what the differences are, and some economic interests are actually defined by certain religious points of views and so on.

So I guess I’m just commiserating with you more than answering by saying, yeah, that’s really hard, and then I think at that point we just have to do our honest best to report the fact that these things are not so easily separated; for the actors involved, they’re actually melded, and if we want analytically to separate them, we can try, but we’re going to hit serious constraints in our ability to do that.

SHADI HAMID: I just feel like if causal inference is central to the enterprise of political science, it’s going to be a problem for [religion]; right? CHRISTIAN SMITH: It will present a problem to certain versions of variable social science. I think certain versions of variable social science are inherently flawed, I mean, they don’t actually match up to the way the world works, and so they don’t give us a good tool to make sense of it. For example, the idea that there are all these separate variables that have an independent effect net of everything else somehow, it’s just not how the world works. So I’m much more interested in conjunctural, interactive, and path-dependent causation historical approaches.



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But back to your first part of your question, I mean, a fundamental question in the philosophy of social science is: Are reasons causes? That is, if we are trying to explain things, an explanation would have to do with showing the causes. I think the answer is obviously yes, reasons are causes. There are whole traditions in social science that you know that would discount that. Anything having to do with human subjectivity doesn’t fit empiricism’s grid. You observe subjectivity. So you have people’s reports, but then all you’re analyzing is discourse, not experience.

So I just think it requires a reframing of our philosophy of social science to let the way the world really is and the way people really are dictate to us how we go about making explanations rather than bringing to the world, here’s what is scientific, and if it doesn’t fit that account, there’s a problem.

JEFF HARDIN, University of Wisconsin: I know at my university, our chancellor, who was in the Obama administration, and there are a number of other people who studied sociology in the social work department but really are social scientists who are studying poverty, there seems to be all kinds of religious reference made. A number of these people are self-identified religious practitioners, they view religious phenomena or religious communities as vital to the discussion. I just wonder, is that an aberration or -- CHRISTIAN SMITH: I’m not saying that all social scientists are foaming at the mouth anti-religious atheists. I mean, in certain sectors, certain people, I wouldn’t call it disciplinary, though. In certain sectors, certain subfields, people have realized, oh, this -- we have to figure this out, we have to do a better job at understanding this. I would still say there is a difference between individual scholars and projects and initiatives in certain sectors of social science versus the dominant culture of social science and the inherited legacy in social science. I still think that that fundamentally doesn’t get religion because it’s founded on very deep presuppositions about human beings and such. But I guess I’m saying some disciplines like anthropology and sociology should naturally be able to make good sense of religion. Others, like economics, where their whole setup of framework of understanding of like what they’re even trying to explain and how, it’s harder to make sense of religion, which you can do in economics of religion, but economics itself can’t really swallow religion without choking on it too much. And then



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psychology is just sort of evolving more and more in a natural science direction with biology and neuroscience and so on. So things are in motion.

Yeah, there are differences, and really to hammer this out in particulars, we would have to really get down to the brass tacks of each discipline, and I’m going to overgeneralize, but I still think that there is a dominant culture and sort of outlook on the world that infuses most of the social sciences despite individuals and despite programs that may be different.

CARL CANNON, RealClearPolitics: You mentioned that through most of the century, sociologists didn’t think religion was worth studying. My question is why the civil rights movement didn’t utterly change that calculus.

CHRISTIAN SMITH: I think that is a case study of exactly what I’m talking about. It didn’t change things, and it’s because it’s not the case that seeing is believing, it’s the case that believing is seeing, and so when social scientists at least looked at the civil rights movement, they didn’t see what you just described. Most of the important interpretations of it in the field of social movements, which I was in, I was right in the heart of that early in my career, were reducing the civil rights movement to political opportunities. I mean, there would be reference to churches, but what got through the sociological grid about churches in the civil rights movement is that it provided the movement “block recruitment,” meaning you didn’t have to recruit individuals into your movement, you could show up at a church and get 90 percent of the congregation to join as a block, but that’s why the churches were significant. The actual thing that got the people into churches or that made them motivated as they were was not really attended to.

But it’s partly just inability to see the religious dimensions of that movement. It’s really about opportunities, organizational resource mobilization, et cetera, et cetera. And even still today I don’t think that sociologists who study social movements get the role of religion in that movement.



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DAVID RENNIE, Economist: Do you think that there are aspects of American religion which also explain the confrontational relationship with American mainstream journalism? And just briefly on the European side, when you say that you see a kind of healthy role for religion in Britain, I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s not even that Britain is very secular, it’s the death of deference that’s what you’ve got with this kind of soggy New Agey individualistic sort of spiritual kind of, but total distrust in any authority figure.

CHRISTIAN SMITH: I wasn’t trying to suggest that in England it was a healthy relationship, I was saying it was more a relaxed relationship. That’s my observation, that compared to the United States, there is just more of a natural interweaving. So the first point, about inerrancy. That’s a word that describes a subset of mostly Evangelicals and fundamentalists, Protestants. It wouldn’t apply to Catholic or Jewish, or most Jewish, I don’t think would use that language or even think in those terms. And Evangelicals have a whole range of positions on the inspired or authoritativeness of scripture in relation to God. So I think it tends to be that those who think that the Bible is inerrant feel more authorized or obliged to say things in public like that, and so it’s a matter of, who is the most likely to step up to the microphone and say something that will set a journalist off? But the first point I’m trying to make is inerrantists are a minority of Americans, of even -- and maybe even of Evangelicals.

But I agree with your point that those who are most likely to jump into the fray and say things in public that trigger lots of other reactions from other people are more likely to be people that many of us would think are crazy. I also personally think that with that, that one of the main ways that Americans amuse themselves is by constantly rehearsing these kind of standard conflicts about Ten Commandments in the law court and look at the southern judge. I mean, it’s one of our forms of entertainment, not to belittle any of the work you do, but there is part of me that tends to think that we are just in such despair about our existential situation in life in the world that we need that kind of story to keep us from slitting our throats, just as entertainment. How’s that for reductionistic?



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MIRANDA KENNEDY, NPR: So you spoke about the ways that the attitudes inside social science in the ’50s and ’60s, and it seems like you were saying that things had shifted a little bit. But I just wanted to clarify, what are the ways, if at all, people have changed their thinking on religion? CHRISTIAN SMITH: So in the ’50s and ’60s, as far as I’ve been able to discern, religion was thought of as completely irrelevant, not related or important to anything that a sociologist or generally social scientists would want to study. It was just doxic that that’s just not interesting, it’s not important. Starting in the ’70s and moving into the ’80s and after, again there is this semi-begrudging like, oh, no, religion, isn’t going away, this is still part of -- even if it’s just jihadists or whatever that, you know, trouble us, but that this really is still part of geopolitics, American politics, lots of things, attitudes, opinions, social conflict, and that probably social science needs to figure it out and have something to say about it, but again within the framework, “Probably somebody else should do that, that’s not what I do in my research.” There’s a begrudging acknowledgement that religion is still something you have to take seriously or somebody else needs to take seriously. But, yes, not too much has changed. What’s changed is just an awareness, an awareness, religion is still important in some way, but not that that will change my research agenda for most social scientists.

And, again, after being told, “Don’t study religion,” “Don’t study religion,” at UNC Chapel Hill, finally my chair came to me and said, “That was the stupidest advice I ever gave, I was totally wrong,” and it was mostly because there was so much grant money in religion at the time.

BYRON YORK, Washington Examiner: You have talked about members of your profession basically respecting the religious beliefs and practices of some Americans and really not of others so that the creation believing, Ten Commandments posting white southern Evangelical is not on the respected end of things, and just talking about your profession, is that just all political bias? Is there something else playing into it?



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CHRISTIAN SMITH: It’s political and social, partly social class, so it’s not just their political views. If a religious person is better educated, better spoken, and knows how to properly keep their religion in its place, that will be okay. So most mainline Protestants will have learned such ways of -- and not because they want to impress their colleagues, that’s just how mainline Protestantism will operate. And so that will be more acceptable. So I guess it’s an interaction of sort of respectable knowledge class education social class and sort of where one sits in one’s political views on a spectrum of things. MICHAEL GERSON: I thought that one of the most provocative phrases you used was the phrase you used dismissively, the modern religion of the individual, which I think you said was a Durkheim phrase. But it seems to apply to prosperity gospel Protestants and cafeteria Catholics and Libertarian pot smokers, and New Agers, and it seems to be very American. I wonder if you have any thoughts on just individualism as a trend and maybe the way that’s affected even believers in the way they interpret their own faith, and how modern is that? How pervasive is that?

CHRISTIAN SMITH: Right. In a way, Durkheim was completely right, and I didn’t mean it dismissively in the sense that that was crazy, I meant it in the sense that Durkheim’s religion of the individual is not what traditionally religion has stood for, so it’s a migration of the holy from religious traditions to individualism basically. It’s clear that in the United States individualism is one among many strong themes in our culture that people use to sort of understand themselves and life in the world. I think we’re not radical individualists, I think we’re voluntaristic individualists, meaning that we’re strong individualists, but we also really think that part of what a good individual probably should do is voluntarily be part of civic organizations like churches and other things, the YMCA and so on. So we’re not an anti-joining people even though we’re individualistic people. So I think that voluntaristic version of individualism has really profoundly been reshaping or reconstituting the nature of American religion. Catholicism has clearly become transformed into much more individualist, the individual believers, the authority of what they’re going to believe, not church teachings or dogma. Evangelicalism or all Protestantism is almost by definition in some sense individualistic even if there is a



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voluntarist-joining congregationalist dimension to it. It’s partly because American religion operates on a marketplace model where anybody can choose anything, there isn’t a state religion, et cetera, and so the religions need to appeal to individuals as adherence to get them to continue to believe, come, and give money, and so that turns religion into something of a consumer item, which arguably sociologically keeps it more robust than, say, a lot of European traditions where there is a state church and everyone more or less loses interest. DAVID GREGORY: But does that mean if there is more individualism sociologically, is it more difficult then to use religion as a basis to understand reality if you’re getting away from group thinking, group explanations for a group way of thinking? CHRISTIAN SMITH: From the point of view of many historic religions, yes, but this goes back to the theoretic discussion of this morning of, what is a “religion?” Is there an essential something of religion that will define how good or bad we’re doing in relation to it? Is there some part of history that must always -- or tradition, received tradition, that must always be part of it, or is it just whatever people make of it? So I would say something like the practical answer to your question is insofar as Americans are still joiners mostly, although that’s diminishing a bit, to the extent that the organizations and congregations they join can mobilize them as individuals to believe and support something, it is still very possible to construct communities of people with shared beliefs, shared commitments and outlooks, who will act in certain ways. So it’s not the destructive end of what you’re talking about, but it makes it more challenging. The conditions of it succeeding have got to take into account the kind of individuals we’re talking about and work with it rather than just assume, well, if the church teaches that, the people will follow.

EMMA GREEN: It seems to me that at the same time as you’re identifying all of these problems with social science and the academy and everything, yada yada yada, you know, on the internet in particular there is this I think cultural knowledge access assumption that if there’s a study about it, then we can make some conclusion about how humans act, and that might just be like the lazy world of internet journalism that I reside in, but I think there definitely is a positivist strain to that. How do you think both academics and



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journalists residing in the same kind of crummy place in terms of being able to figure out what in the world is going on in religion in the first place should do with that and what should be sort of the attenuations in their behavior and, you know, have you experienced the deep cuts internet that is actually positivist in nature? CHRISTIAN SMITH: I could be missing something, but it seems to me there are a number of process changes that could help matters, but they’re probably all utopian, so I’m not going to focus on them, like the political economy of the production of news gives people more time to research, and so I’m not going to go there, but somehow it seems to me that this is a case of anything like it, and there is no way to get around it other than -- if I wanted to -- if I realized or if you realized, oh, here’s a dimension of human life that I’ve missed, I haven’t gotten it, and it’s actually really important, I need to get it, I need to understand it better, I need to give myself better tools to be able to understand and explain it, it seems to me that it’s the same, religion or anything else, it’s going to be the same process: spend a lot of time doing a lot of reading, talking to people, going out into the natural settings in the real world, visiting, soaking and poking, taking in, going to events. It’s just learning about it through lots and lots of ways to the point where again if I wanted to become a specialist in Hinduism, that’s what I would have to do. And it seems like social scientists need to do that in various ways and journalists need to do that, otherwise we’re just stuck. EMMA GREEN: And so do you think that’s satisfying when you get to the endpoint there, wherever you can figure out, that’s going to be a satisfying way of understanding what’s going on in the hearts and heads of people when they’re having these mystical experiences with God? CHRISTIAN SMITH: I think for most people it’s just sort of practice of -- and a lot of it’s observable, I mean what people do, but I don’t think most of it’s inaccessible. Religion gets acted out in what certain scholars call “liturgies,” not like the Anglican liturgy, but like here are practices in which you engage in order to access the superhuman power or force that you believe exists that you want to have a relationship or interaction with. It’s not all just interior, it’s practiced.And so I think practices and then people’s accounts of what they’re doing when they engage in a practice can tell us a huge amount that we need to know.



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MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Join me in thanking Professor Smith for a wonderful presentation.

END

The Faith Angle Forum is a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For more information visit our website: www.faithangle.org

or contact Michael Cromartie at [email protected]

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