Understanding World Religions by Irving Hexham

Crisp, comprehensive, packed with unusual insights, and refreshing in style, Hexhams
book is invaluable for anyone wishing to understand the recent religious resurgence that
has caught so many educated people by surprise, and shown up their tone deafness about
all that is happening.
Os Guinness, author of The Case for Civility
As Pope Benedict constantly reminds us, Christians today face a new situation where
other religious traditions once more challenge Christian belief just as they did in the days
of the apostles. This book helps us understand our non-Christian neighbors and as such is
a valuable tool for all Catholic educators.
H enry Rosenbaum, SAC Former Director of Education
for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Calgary
This is not the conventional or predictable textbook on world religions. As a good

teacher, Irving Hexham is not afraid to offer the kind of opinion or insight that is bound
to provoke discussion and debate. This book is the fruit of many years of trying to encourage university students to engage meaningfully with the study of religion and is borne out
of great experience.
GeraldJ. Pillay, Vice-Chancellor (President)
and Rector, Liverpool Hope University
This textbook-type tour of world religions, spiced with personal close-ups, fully merits
a place on thoughtful Christians bookshelves. Informal and informative, learned, wise,
chatty, and sometimes provocative, it is a very impressive performance.
J.I. Packer, Professor of Theology, Regent College
My former colleague from Regent College days, and long-time friend, Irving Hexham has written an absolutely fascinating book on world religions which ref lects a balance
and level of scholarship rarely found in introductory works. Therefore, I enthusiastically
endorse this book.
Bruce Waltke, Professor of Old Testament,
Knox Theological Seminary
0310259442_understanding_int_CS4.indd 1
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Irving Hexham writes that bland approaches [to the study of religion] produce bland
students. Irving Hexham is not bland, and by combining authoritative knowledge of the
worlds religions with a keen eye for current events, he has given us a textbook that will
not produce bland students. Instead it will produce students who know about religion and
who know how religious people the world over relate to the crucial issues of the day.
TerryC. Muck, Dean and Professor of Mission and World
Religion, E.Stanley Jones School of World Mission and
Evangelism, Asbury Theological Seminary
Irving Hexham is well known to his many readers through his publications on religious
studies, both as a general field of research, as well as represented in various movements,
both local and worldwide. In Understanding World Religions, his provocative work, especially
on African and also Indian religious views, is worth the price of the volume. We need to
examine these often neglected areas of study.
GaryR. Habermas, Distinguished Research Professor and Chair
of the Department of Philosophy and Theology, Liberty University
Often it is just scholars who take real interest in world religions and new religious
movements. The only time most of us lift our heads is when we hear of some tragic event
that shows us other people believe differently than we do. But this is the world we live in
and Irving Hexhams book is a resource that brings clarity to this vast world of religious
beliefs. This book needs to be read and kept available on the bookshelf of every Christian
leader.
Carson Pue, President, Arrow Leadership
2/1/11 10:14 AM
ZONDERVAN
Understanding World Religions
Copyright 2011 by Irving Hexham
Requests for information should be addressed to:
Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hexham, Irving.
Understanding world religions / Irving Hexham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 477). and index.
ISBN 978-0-310-25944-2 (hardcover, printed) 1. ReligionsTextbooks. I. Title.
BL80.3.H49 2011
200dc22
2010013103
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International
Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights
reserved worldwide.
Maps by International Mapping. Copyright 2011 by Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Any Internet addresses (websites, blogs, etc.) and telephone numbers printed in this book are offered as a
resource. They are not intended in any way to be or imply an endorsement by Zondervan, nor does Zondervan vouch for the content of these sites and numbers for the life of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for
brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Cover design: Christopher Tobias
Cover photography: Kazuyoshi Nomachi/Corbis
Interior design: Publication Services, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 /DCI/ 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Contents
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Part 1
Studying Religion
1. Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2. A Biased Canon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Part 2
African Traditions
3. African Religious Traditions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4. Witchcraft and Sorcery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
5. God in Zulu Religion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
6. The Case of Isaiah Shembe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Part 3
The Yogic Tradition
7. The Origins of Yogic Religions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
8. The Richness of the Hindu Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
9. Rethinking the Hindu Tradition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
10. Gandhi the Great Contrarian. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
11. Buddhism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
12. The Development of Buddhist Belief and Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195
13. The Moral Quest of Edward Conze. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
14. Other Yogic-Type Traditions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
Part 4
The Abramic Tradition
15. Early Judaism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
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6
16. Rabbinic and Other Judaisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271
17. Jewish Faith and Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
18. Martin Bubers Zionist Spirituality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
19. Christ ianity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325
20. Christ ian History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
21. Christ ian Faith and Practice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367
22. Christ ian Politics according to Abraham Kuyper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387
23. The Challenge of Islam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 399
24. Muslim Beliefs and Practices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
25. Muslim Piety. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 441
26. Sayyid Qutb and the Rebirth of Contemporary Islam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453
Conclusion: Whither Religious Studies?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465
Suggestions for Further Reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 487
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Acknowledgments
For a book like this, the most appropriate place to begin in acknowledging all the
help I have received over the years is with my entrance to Lancaster University in 1967.
Therefore, I must begin by thanking Colin Lyas for accepting a former gas fitter into
a degree program even though I did not fit the normal category of incoming students
straight out of an English grammar school. Next, I need to thank the excellent religious
studies professors who taught me at Lancaster, beginning with Ninian Smart, Edward
Conze, Adrian Cunningham, Bob Morgan, James Richardson, Stuart Mews, and James
Dickie (Yaqub Zaki). The education provided by the department at Lancaster was second
to none. Clark Pinnock and Francis Schaeffer also deserve mentioning for encouraging me
to go to university in the first place. Their recognition of my academic potential and real
support changed my life from that of a manual worker to a scholar.
After leaving Lancaster, I went to the University of Bristol, where I studied with two
excellent Africanists, Fred Welbourn and Kenneth Ingham, to whom I owe a great deal.
Fred taught me to understand African thought and encouraged my interest in new religious movements, while Kenneth insisted that I become a competent historian. Later G.C.
Pipin Oosthuizen and Hans-Jrgen Becken deepened my knowledge of African religion,
as did Gerald Pillay and the Right Reverend Londa Shembe. More recently, Ulrich van der
Heyden also played an important role in encouraging my study of religion in both Africa
and Germany.
Michael Hahn of the University of Marburg is to be thanked for kindly allowing me to
sit in on his graduate course on Buddhism at the University of Calgary and for later proving
to be a true friend. So too Tony Barber deserves thanks for his friendship and insights into
Chinese religion and culture. Niri Pillay and her mother also provided vivid insights into
the Hindu tradition. Samerah Barett and Nastaran Naskhi need to be thanked, alongside
my former neighbor Ishmael Bavasah, for correcting my understanding of Islamic culture.
Samerah took time out of her busy schedule in law school to carefully read and comment
on my chapters on Islam, which I appreciate. So too did Gordon Nickle, who graciously
corrected any academic errors he found in the text. Katrine Brix provided scholarly comments on my chapter on Christ ianity, while Trevor Watts and Kristen Andruchuk also
looked it over and gave their views as Christ ian readers. Henry Srebrnik advised with the
chapter on Judaism, and I also benefited from regular conversations with my colleagues
Eliezer Segal, Leslie Kawamura, and Elizabeth Rohlman.
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8 Acknowledgments
My thanks go to both the staff at Research Serv ices of the University of Calgary and
the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada for their generous support of my research
over many years. Without them I would have produced far less. In particular the grants I
received to visit Africa and Europe helped greatly with this book.
Finally, I must thank a host of students from numerous religious traditions who took
my courses at the University of Calgary. They both inspired me and corrected my misunderstandings of their traditions.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Introduction
About This Book

Why on earth would anyone write yet another introduction to world religions? In the
course of writing this book I have asked myself this question many times. The reason is,
however, fairly simple. I was dissatisfied with existing religious studies texts, which tend
to be rather antiseptic works written on the basis of a 1960s Star Trek form of cultural relativism that is, frankly, dull. Like Captain Kirk and his crew, their authors appear to feel
mandated to observe religious traditions without offering criticisms of any except Chris
tianity. Such an approach attempts to present the facts as neutrally as possible, but it fails
to stimulate discussion or challenge the prejudices of students about real issues.
Therefore, I attempt to go beyond mere description to introduce students to the type of
controversy that I believe lies at the heart of all healthy academic pursuits. My book aims to
be like Rodney Starks one-time best-selling Sociology (1992), which presents theories and
issues in the context of real academic disputes. It also takes its cue from Walter Kaufmanns
equally stimulating Religion in Four Dimensions (1976). The rationale behind this approach
is that one ought to draw students into the study of religion and religions by addressing
issues that capture their imaginations.
When my Concise Dictionary of Religion first appeared in 1993, various reviewers praised
it for its objectivity in reporting basic information. Nevertheless, some reviewers worried
that it was opinionated, that after giving the facts, I sometimes gave my opinion. WilliamM. Johnston saw the logic of my approach as a teaching technique when he wrote,
More than most reference book writers, Hexham fans controversy ... this introduction to
persons and concepts sparkles, particularly in classroom use. No other glossary combines
range, incisiveness and outspokenness so dexterously ... This glossary shows how a reference work can voice dissent without sacrificing rigor.
I believe that while individuals who belong to different religions may be good people,
the teachings of some religious groups may be evil. Therefore, papering over controversial
issues simply opens the door for critics like Christopher Hitchens, the author of God Is Not
Great (2007), and groups such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation, who fault scholars of religion for their lack of common sense. One may strongly disagree with Hitchens
and his colleagues, such as Oxford professor Richard Dawkins,1 the author of The God
Delusion (2006), who together form a group of highly critical writers promoting what is
1. For information on Dawkins see his website: http://richarddawkins.net/.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
10 Introduction
often called the new atheism,2 but one cannot deny that they make some interesting
points.
From experience, I know that students are far more likely to take an issue seriously and
become fascinated by a topic if they are presented with different opinions that challenge
their way of thinking or the work of other academics. Bland approaches produce bland
students. Therefore, when I present controversial topics or points of view that are normally
ignored by introductory texts, I am not necessarily presenting my own views. What I am
doing is presenting ideas and arguments that I believe will stimulate debate and draw students into serious discussions about the study of religion.
For example, in chapter9 I present various arguments about the origins of Indian, or
what I call yogic, religions, which are related to the Indus Valley civilization, and I raise
issues surrounding the Aryan invasions. Then, in chapter10 I introduce NiradC. Chaudhuris ideas about the development of the Hindu tradition. Not everyone will agree with
what is said here; Chaudhuri is an important commentator who makes a convincing argument that deserves attention even though some people regard his work as controversial. By
presenting the Hindu tradition in this way, I intend for students to be stimulated to find
out more and to seriously study the issues involved.
Therefore, while some people will disagree with the ideas and arguments, the way they
are presented allows professors and students alike to enter into meaningful debates. In this
way the book is a teaching tool rather than a set text that preserves a received tradition.
Another area where some readers will feel disquiet is in my discussions of various modern thinkers at the end of each main section that outlines a major religious tradition. For
example, my treatment of Gandhi as a contrarian will surprise many readers and annoy
some. Others will complain that I spend far too little time discussing Gandhis personal
religious beliefs and far too much time on his views about imperialism and cultural issues.
My approach is intended to make people see beyond stereotypes. What I hope to achieve
is a presentation that makes the reader want to read what Gandhi, and the others I discuss,
actually said and that develops in the reader a fascination with these important and, each
in their own way, fascinating people.
As a student of Ninian Smart (19272001), I place great value on understanding a religion as it is understood by its practitioners. To borrow Smarts words, I believe the student
of religion must learn to walk in anther persons moccasins, or, to put it another way,
see the world through the interpretive lenses, or tinted glasses, worn by true believers.
My other mentors include Edward Conze (19041979), James Dickie (or Yaqub Zaki,
to give him his Arabic name), Kenneth Ingham, and Fred Welbourn (19121986)a ll
of whom took very different approaches to the study of religion and never avoided controversy. I also admire, among others, the work of Walter Kaufmann (19211980) and
Karl Popper (19021994), to whom I owe an intellectual debt. From all of these people
I learned that understanding precedes criticism, which expresses the spirit of this book.
The book is divided into four parts: (1) Studying Religion, (2) African Traditions, (3) The Yogic Tradition, including Hindu religions and Buddhism, and (4) The
2. The New Atheism, Wired, November 2006.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Introduction
11
Abramic Tradition, which includes Christ ianity, Judaism, and Islam; these are followed
by a short conclusion ref lecting on Christ ian approaches to other religious traditions. Each
part deals with a major religious tradition and some of its manifestations. These sections are
designed to provide basic information about various religions in an engaging way. Thus,
the last chapter dealing with each major religion focuses on one particular individual. In
this way students are given insights into the work of people who embrace specific religious
traditions, and they are helped to see that very often such people adopt positions that seem
contradictory to outsiders. This is done to help students grasp the complexity of religious
life and recognize that engagement with an individuals life and work brings with it the
realization that religious beliefs are never as neat and clear-cut as they appear in most
textbooks.
Initially I had planned to make each part and each section within it identical. As a result
I intended to produce a uniform manuscript which allows students to compare the history,
teachings, and practices of each major religious tradition with those of other traditions
systematically. As I wrote the book, I found that this neat scheme did not work. Religions
and religious traditions are different. Each is unique. Therefore, a different approach was
demanded for each tradition if I hoped to capture its essence in a few short chapters. As a
result the book lacks the obvious cohesion of the earlier plan but is, I believe, more authentic and useful to the student of religions.
Some readers will no doubt find the inclusion of footnotes tiresome and inappropriate for an introductory textbook. Although I can understand this reaction, I believe it is
wrong. Therefore, I compromised by providing footnotesa nd at times there are a lot
of themonly for those sections and arguments where serious questions exist about the
claims I make. In this way I provide professors and students with a means of checking
things out for themselves and seeing why I say the things I do on controversial or littleknown topics.
Similarly, maps were used only when they added to the text and dealt with unfamiliar
issues. Therefore, there are no biblical maps which are easily found in other books. The
pictures also were chosen in the hope that they will communicate something of the ethos
of a religion in a particular time and place. As a result they are rather eclectic and not the
standard glossy photo. Hopefully they make the book interesting and are informative.
Other readers may be surprised that I have retained the essentially Christ ian designations of dates, BC and AD, instead of the increasingly popular Common Era or
CE and BCE. This is because the Common Era is common to Jews and Christ ians
but still excludes Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims. It is therefore a very misleading term.
For this reason I prefer the traditional Western usage to a modern innovation which does
not even have the saving grace that it supposedly developed in a homogeneous society.
In conclusion, I hope that this book will stimulate debate and encourage a new generation of students to become involved in the study of religion and religious traditions.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Part 1
Studying Religion
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Chapter 1
Introductory Issues in
the Study of Religion
What Is Religion?
Most people have a clear idea of what
they mean by religion and can usually
identify religious behavior when they
see it. Nevertheless, when we have to
define religion, we soon discover that the
task is quite difficult, because religion
is manifested in many different ways in
our world. Thus, while for most people
religion involves a belief in God, this is
not true for certain forms of Buddhism.
Indeed, to the educated Buddhist, God is
quite unimportant.
Yet for many peasants living in Buddhist countries, the role of gods in their
daily lives is important. Therefore, a distinction has to be made between Buddhism as a great tradition1 and the many
little traditions embedded in a predominantly Buddhist culture. The educated
Buddhist does not seek God, but his peasant neighbor, while acknowledging the
importance of Buddhism for liberation,
does worship various gods.
Because of the difficulties created by
movements, such as Buddhism, that are
Photo 1.1 This small side shrine is part of

a larger Buddhist temple. From the arrange
ment, flowers, and fruit, it is clear that the Bud
dha receives veneration from his followers.
But the Buddha is a man, not a god. So what
makes Buddhism a religion?
1. See, e.g., Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956), 70104.
15
2/1/11 10:14 AM
16 Studying Religion
clearly religious, many students turn to experts for a definitive definition of religion. What
they find is a bewildering series of definitions. For example, sociologist mile Durkheim
(18581917) defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred
things, that is to say, things set apart and forbiddenbeliefs and practices which unite
into one single moral community called a Church, all those
who adhere to them.2
Another author who is often
cited for his definition of religion is the philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804), who
def ined religion as the recognition of all duties as divine
commands. 3 Similarly, Max
Mller (18231900), whom
many regard as the true founder
of religious studies,4 gave a
twofold definition of religion
as a body of doctrines handed
down by tradition, or in canonical books, and containing all
Photo 1.2 Max Mller is generally known as the father of religious
that constitutes the faith of Jew,
studies. Although he concentrated his work on the religions of India,
Christ ian, or Hindu and as a
he had wide interests and an appreciation for African and other reli
gious traditions neglected by later scholars.
faculty of faith ... which distinguishes man from animals.5
Ref lecting on these and many similar definitions of religion, one soon sees that most of
them ref lect both the complexity of the subject and the interests of the person making the
definition. Thus Durkheim writes as a sociologist, Kant as a philosopher, and Mller as a
historian-linguist inf luenced by theological discussions.
Ninian Smarts Model for Identifying Religion

It was for this and related reasons that Ninian Smart, who founded the first religious studies
department in Britain, proposed that serious students of religion abandon the quest for a
clear definition in favor of a workable model, or guide, which would allow the student to
identify religion and religions as they are observed in daily life. Instead of defining religion
theoretically, Smart argued, we ought to call something a religion when it conforms to
2. mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1915; fifth impression, 1964), 47.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956),
134.
4. Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975), 3538.
5. Max Mller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 1617.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion
17
certain general characteristics found in similar phenomena which we also call religions. We
can say we are in the presence of a religion, he suggested, when we discover
a set of institutionalized rituals, identified with a tradition and expressing and/or
evoking sacral sentiments directed at a divine or trans-divine focus seen in the context
of the human phenomenological environment and at least partially described by myths
or by myths and doctrines.6
Each of the key terms in this model for identifying religion can be discussed at great
length. All we will do here is brief ly discuss their key characteristics. First of all, when we
attempt to study a religion, or religions, all we can really do is look at their institutional
manifestations. We can observe behavior, but we can never really know what goes on in a
persons head. Therefore, for practical purposes, studying religion means studying religious
institutions or institutions identified as religious. This means the study of religion is the
study of religious movements which are observable within society and therefore are a form
of social movement.
The next question is whether a movement is religious or secular. Many secular movements appear religious. For example, a crowd at a hockey game or watching American
football often acts in ways that look like those of a religious group. But although some
people argue that such actions are religious at heart, there is
a big difference between a secular and a religious gathering.
Political parties, the fans mobbing rock stars, and the veneration of nationalist leaders all have similarities to religion, but
none are religious in themselves. Therefore, they need to be
excluded from our study.
This is why the other characteristics indicated by Smart are
important. Let us begin by considering ritual behavior. Rituals are repetitive behavior fixed by tradition. In the study of
religion they are, as Smart says, traditional religious behavior
or actions. Probably the most obvious form of ritual is the
Roman Catholic Mass, which contains a lot of color, carefully
ordered actions, a fixed order of words, particular smells, and
what is in many ways a carefully orchestrated theatrical performance. In other religious traditions, things like pilgrimage
to Mecca, for Muslims, or sacrifices and ritual bathing, for
Hindus, are good examples of ritual action.
Photo 1.3 Ninian Smart at a confer
Some religious traditions, especially those associated with
ence in Washington, D.C., shortly be
religious movements such as the Protestant Reformation, react
fore his death. He pioneered modern
strongly against what they call dead rituals. Such groups fail
religious studies at Lancaster Univer
to recognize their own ritual actions while identifying the ritsity, in England, before moving to the
uals of other religious movements as somehow unspiritual or
University of Santa Barbara in the U.S.
6. Ninian Smart, Towards a Definition of Religion, unpublished paper, Lancaster University, 1970. Cf.
Ninian Smart, The Worlds Religions (Engelwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1989), 1021.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
false. For example, the Plymouth Brethren strongly reject rituals like those of the Catholic
Mass or High Anglican services on theological grounds. Yet, in fact, their own services have
many rituals, even though the participants usually fail to recognize them as rituals. The very
order and arrangement of the Brethren service actually make it a ritual action. Consequently,
rituals need to be understood in terms of the convictions of the worshipers and the relationship between them and the divine, or, as Smart argues in some cases, the trans-divine.
Seeing ritual in this way, one can argue that a football game is a ritual act, but not a religious one. And yet very clearly the divine, or trans-divine, element is missing. This is why,
Smart insists, religious rituals need to be identified with a tradition. Traditions are those
things that add meaning to action. For students, probably the best example of a tradition is
the act of graduation after they complete their degree. On such occasions people dress up
in peculiar clothes, make speeches, and do all sorts of unusual things. While cynics might
say that such actions are a waste of time, they serve a useful purpose. They remind people
that the awarding of a degree conveys certain privileges and responsibilities that gain their
validity from the fact that they are not some new, f ly-by-night invention. Tradition assures
the student that their degree is valid because the institution awarding it has stood the test
of time. Thus a degree from Harvard University is immediately recognized because of the
tradition associated with Harvard, while one from Upper Backwoods College may have
little value.
Smart then notes that these institutions, and the rituals and traditions associated with
them, have an impact upon the people involved. This he describes as expressing and/or
evoking sacral sentiments. In other words, participating in religious activities within the
framework
a traditionalsuggestion
institution not only
expressesrecognizing
a certain commitment
to spiritual
Ninian ofSmarts
about
a religion
Institutions
Rituals
Traditions
Religion
Myths
Doctrines
Sacral
Sentiments
Figure 1.1 Ninian Smarts suggestion about recognizing a religion. When all of these features are
found together in society, then we are probably dealing with a religion.
When all of these features are found together in

society then we are probably dealing with a religion.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
19
values but often has the remarkable effect of creating or evoking a sense of the sacred in the
worshiper and sometimes even in people who simply attend the ceremony without really
intending to worship.
This sense of the sacred, Smart explains, is directed at a divine or trans-divine focus.
That is, the participant directs their feeling of worship, awe, and respect toward either the
divine or something beyond the divine. By the divine he means God, gods, or, as in
the case of Buddhism, something beyond or at least separate from the divine. This latter
option Smart identifies as the trans-divine focus, a term for such things as Nirvana in
Buddhism, or the veneration of ancestors in African and other
primal traditions.
Next, Smart reminds his readers that religion takes place
within the human phenomenological environment, by which
he means the totality of human social life and individual experience within which religion exists.
Finally, Smart raises the important point that religious
people describe their beliefs and practices in terms of myths,
or, as he says, myths and doctrines. Here it is important to
Photo 1.4 Mircea Eliade portrayed
understand what Smart means by myth. For many people a
on a Moldovian postage stamp,
myth is a story that is simply untrue. Essentially, this is the way
which shows the esteem in which he
the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (18841976) used
is held in the land of his birth.
myth when he developed his theories about the necessity
of what he called demythologising, which he believed
was necessary to make the New Testament acceptable to
the modern world. In Bultmanns view the New Testament is a product of a prescientific age, many of whose
stories, such as accounts of miracles, are therefore unacceptable to people living in an age of science. Therefore, in his view, these stories need to be reinterpreted to
explain what they really mean in terms of their message
and not regarded as literal accounts of what happened. In
other words, Bultmann says that the stories he identifies
as myths in the New Testament are simply untrue.
On the other hand, some religious writers in the tradition of Mircea Eliade (19071986), Joseph Campbell
(19041987), and Carl Gustav Jung (18751961) define
myth as some sort of special story containing unique
insights into religious truth, archaic insights often lost
to humans living in industrial societies. The task of the
Photo 1.5 Mircea Eliade in discussion with graduate students

date unknown.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
scholar is to probe these myths to get at their inner truths. The problem with this view is
not that it represents myths as untrue but that it represents them as in some sense containing
a supertruth not located in any other type of story.
Against these two extremes stands the anthropological understanding of myth,
which appears to be close to Smarts view. Initially developed by Bronislaw Malinowski
(18841942), who reacted to abstract theorizing by nineteenth-century writers about the
meaning of myth, the anthropological approach looks at myths in terms of their function in
society.7 This definition emphasizes that a myth is any story which affects the way people
live. It is not necessarily either unhistorical, as Eliade tends to argue, or historical. Rather,
a story which becomes a myth can be true or false, historical or unhistorical, fact or fiction. What is important is not some special feature of the story itself but the function which
it serves in the life of an individual, a group, or a whole society.
Myths, in the anthropological understanding, enable members of different societies
and subgroups within societies to make sense of their lives and their world. As anthropologist John Middleton puts it, a myth is a statement about society and mans place in it and
in the surrounding universe ... Myths and cosmological notions are concerned with the
relationship of a people with other peoples, with nature and with the supernatural.8 The
importance of a myth lies not in its particular qualities as a story but in the use made of
it. When a story acts upon the imagination of an individual or group in such a powerful
way that it begins to shape their lives, molding their thoughts and directing their actions,
then that story has become a myth. Thus what makes a story a myth is not its content, as
the rationalists thought, but the way the story takes on a life of its own in the thought of
an individual or an entire society. Once accepted, a myth can be used to ennoble the past,
explain the present, and hold out hope for the future. It gives individual and social life
meaning and direction. This ability to guide action distinguishes myths from legends, folk
tales, and other stories. In short, myths have the power to change lives and shape societies.
However one defines myth, the success of a myth depends upon people accepting and
acting upon what they consider to be its message. Nevertheless, most people who act upon
what they consider to be the message contained in a myth do so because they believe it is
true. In other words, they accept the story as true before it becomes a myth in their lives.
Questions of historic, philosophic, or any other form of verifiable truth are therefore
important in the creation and maintenance of mythologies. In fact, such questions often
precede the acceptance of myths. What matters is not simply the power of myths to inspire
belief and to enable believers to make sense of their experiences but the prior belief that
the story is true.
Smart also points out that while all religions have their own mythic cores, the myths
of a single religion often appear to conf lict with one another or with the teachings of the
group. For example, the Hebrew Bible makes it very clear that there is only one God. Yet
Jesus spoke and acted in such a way that he appeared to accrue to himself certain powers
7. I have developed aspects of this argument in various papers and books, including Irving Hexham and Karla
Poewe, New Religions as Global Cultures (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 7998.
8. John Middleton, ed., Myth and Cosmos (New York: Natural History Press, 1967), x.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
21
and attributes that belong to God alone. For his early Jewish followers such statements and
actions created a crisis of understanding. If there is only one God, how could Jesus possibly
do and say things that only God can do and say? Similarly, in Buddhism there seem to be
contradictory stories about the nature of the Buddha, about whether he has one or many
bodies, and about how these bodies, some of which are spiritual, relate to each other. There
are also questions about how many Buddhas there actually are and how they relate to the
man known to history as the Buddha.
Questions like these gave rise to the development of Christ ian doctrine and Buddhist
philosophizing. Within both religions, and indeed within all other major religious traditions, the sometimes apparently contradictory nature of mythic stories creates the need to
develop doctrine. Doctrines are articulate expressions of logical reasoning applied to the
bedrock mythic substructure found in all religions. In doctrines, theologians and philosophers attempt to show how the stories cohere despite apparent contradictions.
Some Objections to Smarts Views

Helpful as Smarts definition is, some scholars have identified weaknesses in its articulation.
They point out that while it is an excellent description of religion in practice, it remains
essentially descriptive. Hence, while it is very useful for identifying religions, it does little
to help us generate hypotheses or theories about religion. They also note that throughout
history the devout in all religious traditions have complained that some people go through
the motions of piety without really internalizing the tradition itself. As a result we can
find nominal members of any given religion. But, it is claimed, Smart failed to distinguish
between genuine commitment and mere conformity to a social norm.
Finally, some people are deeply committed to ontological values and say they are part of
a great religious tradition yet do not readily identify themselves with religious institutions.
Smarts definition concentrates on societal manifestations of religion within institutions
and ignores individuals who remain outside these institutions, even though these people
may represent a sizable segment of a population. Objections such as these give rise to what
we may call the ontological understanding of religion, which attempts to see beyond the
appearances.
The Ontological Understanding of Religion

Because of the weaknesses of an institutional definition of religion, Fred Welbourn and
others have countered Smarts view by arguing that it simply does not fit the reality of
religion in traditional societies like those of Africa. Welbourn, for example, suggested that
while most members of the African group known as the Baganda used the Arabic word
dini to describe religion as practiced by Arabs, Europeans, and African converts, they
used another word, kusamira, to refer to their traditional religion. For them, the essence of
traditional religious practices was kusamira, which involves ones entire way of life. Thus,
Welbourn sympathized with Paul Tillichs characterization of religion as ultimate concern. Although the use of a model like Smarts allows the scholar to identify the externals
of religious observance, Welbourn and Tillich argue, it often fails to fully capture the
2/1/11 10:14 AM
essence of religion, which involves the totality of personal existence.9
The argument against seeing religion as a way of life
is that it is too inclusive to be of any value to scholars.
If, as Tillich argues, everyone has an ultimate concern,
how can anyone study such a vague concept? Likewise,
if all of life is religion, what is not religious? And how
can we ever talk about religion as an identifiable aspect
of reality? The answer of people like Tillich and Welbourn was that perhaps we should recognize that religious institutions must be studied as institutions and not
as a special category of institution labeled religious.10
Once this is done, Welbourn argued, we must recognize that in an ontological sense all institutions can have
a religious dimension. Therefore, to thoroughly study
religion we must consider both the institutional forms
of piety and ontological commitments.
Many scholars object that the ontological approach
Photo 1.6 Paul Tillich, one of the pioneers
to
religion
results in a definition of religion that
of existential theology. He fled Nazi Germany
includes
everything.
Welbourn counters that unless
to teach in the U.S., where he made his repu
tation as an original thinker. Key to Tillichs
we are prepared to include ontological definitions
understanding of religion is the concept of
we can never really understand the religion of the
ultimate concern. This he based on the
Baganda, Islam, or even certain forms of Christ ian
biblical concept of idolatry, asserting that
ity.11 To reinforce his point he cites the example of
whatever a person makes the most important
some Marxist students he encountered when he was a
thing in their life expresses their true religious
faith. If someone claims to be a Christian but
student at Cambridge in the 1930s. These people, he
their life revolves around their family or some
notes, were not intellectual Marxists but ontological
other created thing, and not God, they are an
believers. Their commitment to Marxism was as total
idolater.
as his own to Christ ianity or that of the Baganda to
their traditional way of life.
We can, he suggests, say that these commitments are examples of pseudo-religion,
but such a judgment, in his view, does an injustice to both the facts and the people involved
in such movements.12 Religion, Welbourn argues, should be viewed in terms of each persons implicit ontological commitments, what really motivates them in their day-to-day
lives, rather than in terms of explicit religiosity, with its unimportant institutional rituals.
Welbourn also argues that while it is easy to recognize myths and rituals, once they
have ceased to function as living realities, we are rarely aware of our own myths and ritu9. Fred B. Welbourn, Towards Eliminating the Concept of Religion, unpublished paper given at the Colloquium on the Concept of Religion, Lancaster University, 1518 December 1969; cf. Paul Tillich, Systematic
Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973; first published 1951), 1:1215.
10. Welbourn, Towards Eliminating the Concept of Religion, 13.
11. Ibid., 1314.
12. Ibid., 78.
2/1/11 10:14 AM

als. For example, no one in sixteenth-century Tudor England
would have regarded stories about King Arthur as a myth.
King Arthur was a reality, and stories about him legitimated
the Tudor dynasty. Today, however, we can see that these
highly religious stories are fictions that served a political and
religious function by providing a basis for rituals that reinforced the dynastys claim to power. But, Welbourn asks,
do we see myths that motivate ourselves and our contemporaries? Do we ref lect on the way the rituals of our society
maintain a specific social order? In his view we do not, but
instead tend to concentrate on myths and rituals of the past
that have lost their power. Using examples like King Arthur,
Welbourn argues that the most powerful myths and rituals
are those we fail to recognize as such. The task of scholars of
religion, then, is to explore modern society in search of living
examples of myths and rituals, to study implicit as well as explicit
expressions of religion.
Dooyeweerd: Ground Motives and

Faith Communities
23
Photo 1.7 Fred Welbourn, who pio

neered the modern study of African
religions. In developing his theories,
which are similar to those of Paul Til
lich, he argued that rather than con
centrating on texts, scholars of reli
gion need to get their hands dirty
by observing what actually goes on
in religious communities. Therefore,
he sought to apply anthropological
methods within the context of reli
gious studies.
Another approach to study of religion is found in the writings

of the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (18941977).
Outlining his understanding of religion in his theoretical text
A New Critique of Theoretical Thought,13 Dooyeweerd opts for a philosophical, ontological
definition. He argues that religion is the innate impulse of human self hood to direct itself
toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning,
which it finds focused concentrically in itself. He then adds, As the absolutely central
sphere of human existence, religion transcends all modal aspects of temporal reality, the
aspect of faith included ... religion is absolute self-surrender.14
Thus for Dooyeweerd, as for Tillich and Welbourn, religion involves each individuals
basic ontological commitment, or ultimate concern, which enables them to function as a
human being. Unlike Tillich and Welbourn, however, Dooyeweerd immediately admits
the weakness of his all-encompassing definition and agrees with the critics of ontological
definitions that any attempt to abstract the purely religious from other aspects of existence
will inevitably ignore some aspects of religion and distort other aspects.
Dooyeweerd then suggests ways in which religion can be meaningfully, though not
exhaustively, studied. In doing so, he recognizes the importance of institutional analysis and
allows for an academic study of religious movements and institutions that is distinct from
the study of ontological commitments. He suggests that when we study religion we need to
recognize that it plays a vital role in the integration of individual personality, even though
13. Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1953).
14. Ibid., 5758.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
we cannot fully grasp the essence of religion at
a personal level. To attempt to grasp an individuals ontological commitments, he claims,
is futile. Therefore, while we cannot precisely
identify an individuals ontological commitments, their ultimate concerns, we can identify such concerns historically and socially
when they are expressed by groups of individuals living in community. In this way Dooyeweerd seems to be coming close to the views
of Smart while at the same time paying attention to the complex issues of commitment. A
religious community, Dooyeweerd argues,
is maintained by a common spirit, which as a
dynamis, as a central motive power, is active in
the concentration-point of human existence.
This spirit of community, he claims, works
through what he calls a religious ground idea
or ground motive, which gives content to the
entire life and thought of a society. Thus it
can be seen in the historical development of
human societies, where it takes on particular
forms that are historically determined.15
Photo 1.8 Herman Dooyeweerd was a Dutch Chris
These insights lead Dooyeweerd to argue
tian philosopher who developed the ideas of Abraham
Kuyper in relation to the philosophy of law. This led him
that the ultimate ontological commitments of
to spend a lot of time pondering the nature of religion.
individuals find expression historically and
As a result he developed ideas similar to those of Wel
socially in various religious or faith commubourn and Tillich.
nities that can be studied. Having recognized
this, he argues, we must also recognize that
because individuals are often born and raised in a faith community and die in it, the commitments expressed in the community are capable of molding both individual members
and the community as a whole. By studying these communities, then, it is possible to
study the ontological commitments of their members. In this way, Dooyeweerd appears to
combine the institutional and ontological definitions of religion while seeking to overcome
common objections to both.
Explicit or Implicit Religion

Social and cultural anthropologists often argue that what people do is more important
than what they say. That is, implicit beliefs find expression in behavior and are as much a
subject for study as explicit statements made by individuals about their beliefs. Most Chris
tians, however, think of religion in terms of explicit beliefs and creedal statements, which
15. Ibid., 61.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
25
Methods for the study of religion

Aesthetics
Anthropology
Art
Astronomy
Chemistry
Classics
Economics
Food
Geography
History
Linguistics
Literature
Physics
Psychology
Sociology
Zoology
Religion
There are as many ways of
studying religion as there
are academic disciplines.
So which methods are the
most useful?
Figure 1.2 Because religion is a living entity, the academic field of religion is much like African stud
ies, womens studies, and a host of other scholarly enterprises that study a multifaceted social reality.
Therefore, it can be legitimately studied from many different perspectives.
are usually taken at face value. Thus theology is based on the analysis of beliefs as they are
found in the Bible, devotional works, and books of theology. Theologians are trained to
read texts, which they then interpret according to established exegetical techniques.
From experience it is clear that people trained in theological and other literary disciplines often find it very difficult to appreciate the methods of social scientists. Therefore,
it is not surprising that when theologians discuss sociology they tend to think of it in
terms of the highly philosophical work of figures like Karl Marx (18181883), Max
Weber (18641920), and Peter L. Berger (1929).16 Rarely does one find a theologian
engaging in serious dialogue with sociologists like Charles Glock (1924),17 Rodney
Stark (1934),18 or Reginald Bibby (1943),19 whose work is based on survey research,
statistical analysis, and empirical observations. Similarly, although such a thing as theological anthropology20 exists, few Christ ians are seriously engaged in social anthropology
16. Cf. Charles Villa-Vicencio, Trapped in Apartheid: A Socio-Theological History of the English-Speaking Churches
(Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1988).
17. Charles Y. Glock and Rodney Stark, Religion and Society in Tension (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965).
18. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985).
19. Reginald Bibby, Fragmented Gods: The Poverty and Potential of Religion in Canada (Toronto: Irvin, 1987).
20. See, e.g., Charles H. Kraft, Christianity in Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1979), for one of the better
examples of this genre.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
as an academic discipline. Occasionally the works of an anthropolog ist like Mar y Douglas
(19212007) may catch the imagination of a theologian, but generally little or no effort is made by
theologians, or people trained in
classical religious studies, to engage
in or understand the discipline
except for apologetic purposes.
One exception to this general
picture of disciplinary apartheid is
the Annual Conference on Implicit
Religion, organized by Welbourns
student, Dr. Edward Bailey. For
almost thirty years he has encouraged the production of numerous
papers and books examining what
he calls implicit religion. By this
he means the actual practices and
beliefs of people as discovered by
others through careful observation
of their actions and not simply by
taking their words at face value.
Bailey argues that it is important to
Photo 1.9 Karl Marx (left) and his close collaborator Friedrich Engels.
This bronze monument was erected during the cold war by the Ger
observe what people actually do,
man Democratic Republic (GDR) in a park near Alexanderplatz in for
not simply analyze what they say.21
mer East Berlin. Unlike many other monuments from that period, it
By observing their actions, the way
has survived. For the GDR, Marxism was a pseudoreligion, as the Ger
they live, he claims, it is possible to
man film Goodbye Lenin brilliantly shows. Yet although most Ameri
get at the nature of peoples actual
cans have no problem rejecting Marxism as a political philosophy, the
ideas of Marx play an important role in theories about the origins and
ontological commitments, that is,
nature of religion.
to detect their implicit religion.
Today, several British universities
offer courses in the area. Both MA and PhD degrees are available on the topic of implicit
religion, although the notion has not really caught on in North America.
Operationalizing Definitions of Religion

Frustrated by the problem of finding a usable definition of religion, one that meets the
practical needs of scholars engaged in empirical research, Rodney Stark and William Sims
Bainbridge have argued for an institutional definition. They rejected all ontological defi21. Information on this group can be obtained from Dr. Edward Bailey, The Rectory, Winterbourne, Nr.
Bristol, England.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
27
nitions on the grounds that meaningful empirical research, based on archival evidence or
fieldwork, demands a clear definition that distinguishes religion from other forms of social
life.22 Therefore, they defined religions as human organizations primarily engaged in providing
general compensators based on supernatural assumptions.23 Later, they refined their theory24 to
define religion in terms of systems of general compensators based on supernatural assumptions (emphasis added).25
Using this definition, Stark and Bainbridge provide their readers with five dimensions
of religiousness.26 These dimensions are based on a scale devised by Stark and Glock 27 and
are not unlike the indicators of religion proposed by Ninian Smart.28 Stark and Bainbridge
describe these factors as belief, practice, experience, knowledge, and consequences. They then
claim that by studying these dimensions of social institutions and movements, scholars are
able to measure and examine religion from a variety of perspectives that allow them to
generate hypotheses and create usable research instruments.
To many people this definition appears reductionist because of the use of the term
general compensators. Stark and Bainbridge are at pains to point out that this is not the
case. They are not proposing a crude deprivation model of religion. Rather, they carefully
explain, they use the terms to refer to clearly religious expectations such as the promise
of a triumph over death.29 Subsequently, in a series of books like For the Glory of God,30
Stark has attempted to show how his theories work by providing many complex examples.
It should be noted that while Stark and Bainbridges understanding of religion excludes
certain types of ontological definition such as Tillichs description of an ultimate concern and
Welbourns analysis of individual commitments,
it includes the type of ontological commitment
Photo 1.10 Rodney Stark, who is arguably the lead

ing sociologist of religion in the U.S. Stark described
this photo as ugly, and in truth it does not do him
justice. His various books offer challenging definitions
of religion, of various religious groups such as cults
and sects, and of new religious movements. Central to
Starks concerns is a desire to move the study of reli
gion away from vague generalizations toward opera
tional definitions that clearly distinguish between dif
ferent forms of religious organization.
22. Stark and Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, 38.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, A Theory of Religions (New York: Peter Lang, 1987).
25. Ibid., 39.
26. Ibid., 910.
27. Rodney Stark and Charles Y. Glock, American Piety (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968).
28. Ninian Smart, Worldviews (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1983), 78.
29. Stark and Bainbridge The Future of Religion, 37.
30. Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2003).
2/1/11 10:14 AM
discussed by Dooyeweerd.31 More importantly, however, Stark and Bainbridge show that by
utilizing their definition it is possible to construct testable hypotheses, general theories, and
definite research programs, which enliven the study of religion.
Religious Studies: Field or Discipline

One very popular approach within religious studies is to argue that there is a particular
method that sets off study of religion from other forms of academic discipline. It is claimed
that religious studies itself is a discipline, because it possesses a unique way of approaching
its subject. In this sense religious studies is seen as analogous to anthropology, economics,
geography, history, sociology, or any other academic discipline. Such an approach was
promoted by Mircea Eliade and his disciples as well as many other religious studies scholars
inf luenced by the idea that there is something peculiar to religion that demands a unique
method if it is to be studied meaningfully.
By contrast, Ninian Smart, Fred Welbourn, Rodney Stark, and many other students of
religion argue that religious studies is a field and not a discipline. On this view, religious
studies is like African studies, Asian studies, womens studies, or any other form of scholarship that takes a multifaceted social reality as its central focus. They argue that, as with
other forms of area studies, religion can, and must, be studied using a multiplicity of methods. In fact, one can study religion using the methods of almost any established academic
discipline, such as aesthetics, economics, or even physics. But for practical purposes Smart
Practical methods for the study of religion

Logic and Philosophy
Religion
Social
Anthropology
and Sociology
History
Figure 1.3 Practical approaches to studying religion based on five key disciplines.
31. Stark and Bainbridge, The Future of Religion, 5153.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
29
argued that it is best to limit the study of religion, at least in its initial stages, using three
main academic traditions: philosophy and logic, history, and the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology. Thus anyone who wishes to understand a religious movement needs to approach it both anthropologically/sociologically and historically. Then
they need to analyze their findings using logic and the tools of philosophy. Later it may be
important to take into account geographic, economic, and other methods to understand
the nature of a particular religion.
The approach taken here is to view religion as an area of human life that needs to be
studied using various well-established academic disciplines. Thus, to really study a religion,
students need to examine its history and beliefs as well as its current cultural context. Such
a multidisciplinary approach is both challenging and very exciting, as I hope you will discover in reading this book.
2/1/11 10:14 AM
Chapter 2
A Biased Canon
Introduction
Recognizing bias is the first step toward critical thinking in academic work, and you can do
it if you develop confidence in your own judgment. By their very nature biases are ingrained.
Therefore, most people do not recognize a bias even when it is staring them in the face. Yet
once this is pointed out and you begin looking for biases, they are relatively easy to find. You
can discover the truth of this statement the next time you read
a book. All you have to do is ask yourself, What is the authors
bias? Then begin looking for it. You will be surprised how
much this simple question reveals. To help you see how biases
can be recognized with a little effort, this chapter provides one
example of the way racism has clearly affected modern thinking
about the nature of religious studies.
The pervasiveness of biases and their ability to distort our
understanding are not something new, discovered by postmodern philosophers in the last fifty years. It has been known
for centuries. Recognizing bias has always formed the basis
of a good education. For example, in 1873, Herbert Spencer
(18201903) wrote a wonderful book exposing the role of
bias in human thinking. The book, The Study of Sociology,1 is a
classic that discusses in great detail the numerous ways bias can
enter into our thinking. It reminds us that recognizing bias is
nothing new. Yet it is something we must learn.
To demonstrate how frequently unrecognized biases
Photo 2.1 Herbert Spencer, whose
appear in textbooks, this chapter will examine the attitude
work on bias is relevant today and ex
poses the modern tendency to think
toward Africa and Africans in religious studies textbooks.
that serious criticism began only a
Even though most of the authors of the books we will examfew years ago.
ine are self-proclaimed liberals who would be horrified at the
1. This is available for free in electronic form from The Liberty Fund. It may be downloaded from http://
oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1335. The main website of The
Liberty Fund is found at http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=149.
31
2/1/11 10:14 AM
suggestion that their books are riddled with racism, there can be no doubt that textbooks
dealing with African religions suffer from a racist heritage. But until this is pointed out to
students, few people consciously recognize the fact, even though many have a subconscious
feeling that something is wrong with what they are reading.
To show how deep the problem of bias runs in religious studies textbooks, we will
survey a number of different works from the late 1960s to the present. Ninian Smart, in
his popular The Religious Experience of Mankind (1969), devoted exactly 5 out of 576 pages
to a consideration of African religion, while the British writer Trevor Ling, in A History of
Religions East and West (1979), managed to avoid the discussion of African religions altogether. Robert S. Ellwood, in Many Peoples, Many Faiths (1982), and David S. Noss, in The
Worlds Religions (1984), make no mention of African religions, nor, more recently, do John
L. Esposito, Darrell J. Fasching, and Todd Lewis, in their 550-page World Religions Today
(2002). In Willard G. Oxtobys massive two-volume, 1100-page edited work, World Religions (2002), only 4 pages are devoted to African religions, with another 4 pages to African
religions in the Americas. Yet 6 pages are devoted to Bahai and 5 to the New Age. Warren Matthews is slightly better in his World Religions (2004), including 22 pages on African
religions; yet of these he devotes 10 pages to ancient Egyptian religions, weakening his
treatment of contemporary religions, especially those practiced south of the Sahara. In like
manner, Christopher Partridge, in his edited work Introduction to World Religions (2005),
treats African religions in a mere 8 pages, while devoting 14 to the Bahai and 22 to the
Zoroastrian tradition, even though it is so small as to be virtually extinct.
More recently, Theodore M. Ludwig, in The Sacred Paths: Understanding the Religions
of the World (2006), classifies African religions under the heading Among Indigenous
Peoples. In this section of his book he weaves African religions together with the native
religions of Australia, North and South America, Indonesia, the South Pacific, and various
other areas where he finds similar patterns of myth and ritual. Not to be outdone, Willard
G. Oxtoby and Alan F. Segal, in their Concise Introduction to World Religions (2007), classify African religions under Indigenous Religious Traditions, devoting only 17 of the
sections 48 pages to Africa. Although in terms of space this is an improvement, it is hard
to justify in terms of the sheer size and diversity of African religious traditions and clearly
shows the insensitivity of scholars to this issue.
Books of readings containing sacred texts are no better. For example, Sacred Texts of
the World: A Universal Anthology, edited by Ninian Smart and Richard D. Hecht, devotes
a mere 5 out of 408 pages to things African. In Lessa and Vogts classic anthropological
Reader in Comparative Religion (1979), only 22 out of 488 pages are devoted to African
religions. The one minor exception to this almost total boycott of African religions by
Western scholars is the 48 pages Whitfield Foy gives to the subject in his 725-page selection of readings for the British Open University entitled Mans Religious Quest (1978). But
even there the attention is limited and disproportionate to that devoted to other traditions,
such as Zoroastrianism, which receives 60 pages.
If one surveys academic journals in religious studies, one finds a dearth of articles on
African religions and few reviews of books about Africa. The uninitiated might attribute
2/1/11 10:14 AM
A Biased Canon
33
Photo 2.2 At first glance

this print seems to present a
picture of Arab or Persian Sufi
dancers. Take a closer look
and you will see that the man
in the middle is clutching a
crosslike symbol. Actually, it is
a mid-nineteenth-century print
of Ethiopian Christian danc
ers. What is often forgotten is
that Christian traditions in Af
rica go back to the time of the
conversion of the Ethiopian
eunuch in Acts 8:2639 and
are among the oldest in the
world, with deep roots in Juda
ism. What this shows is that the
African religious tradition is far
more complex than generally
thought.
this lack of attention to a lack of scholarship dealing with African religions. But this is not
the case. When Hans-Jrgen Becken and Londa Shembe translated some of the works
of Isaiah Shembe, the founder of one of the most important new religious movements in
Africa, into English, the book received very few reviews even though it was published
by an established academic press. This is all the more surprising because at the time of
their publication the Shembe texts were the only English translation of the scriptures of a
major contemporary African religious movement. Instead of being welcomed as the major
breakthrough that they were, they were ignored by journals. Even Religious Studies Review,
which is devoted to reviewing books on religion, pays virtually no attention to books on
African religion and acts as though many of them do not exist.
One could go on providing example after example of the almost total neglect of African religious traditions in standard religious studies texts, but the examples cited make the
point. Finally, before looking at the history of the study of African religions it is important
to remember that all of the authors mentioned above would probably see themselves as
liberal, or even very liberal, and none are even remotely racist. Nevertheless, the ethos
of religious studies in which they work has blinded them to the importance and complexity
of African religious traditions.
African Religions in the Context of World

Religions
Every author of a textbook has to make hard decisions about what to include and what to
leave out. Therefore, to gain some insight into the importance of African religions for the
study of religion, it is perhaps worth surveying the state of world religions over the past
2/1/11 10:15 AM
century. When Louis Henry Jordan published his book Comparative Religion2 in 1905, he
provided the following details about the state of religion in the world:
World Religions 1905

Sikhism 10,000,000
Judaism 10,000,000
Buddhism 50,000,000
African 157,000,000
Islam 205,000,000
Hinduism 210,000,000
Confucian 240,000,000
Christianity 520,000,000
Figure 2.1
More recent figures show that over the twentieth century the relative distribution of
world religions changed as follows:
World Religions 2005

Mormons 10,000,000
Jews 14,000,000
Sikhs 23,000,000
African 100,000,000
Buddhism 374,000,000
Chinese religions 394,000,000
Hinduism 9.000,000
Islam 1.2 billion
Christianity 2.1 billion

Figure 2.2
2. Louis Henry Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1905).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
35
From these charts it is clear that African religions form a significant segment of world religions. Further, while the number
of people practicing traditional African religions fell over the
century, the influence of African traditions on other religions,
such as Christianity and African Islam, remains great. Therefore, there is no excuse for ignoring African religions in religious
studies textbooks. Yet African religions are ignored, and they are
usually treated in a very dismissive way when they are actually
included in such texts or mentioned in academic journals.
Textbook Portrayals of African

and Indian Religion
To illustrate the unfavorable treatment received by African
religions in popular textbooks, those sections dealing with
them in Ninian Smarts otherwise excellent The Worlds
Religions3 will be examined in detail.4 I chose Smarts work
because he was politically liberal and certainly not a racist.
Therefore, his work may be criticized without fear of suggesting his approach to African religions was motivated by racism,
which it most certainly was not. As a result, if his approach is
judged harshly, it ought to provoke us to ask deeper questions
about the study of African religion rather than criticize an
individual who wrote a particular book.
To gain some idea of how biased Smarts approach actually
was, we will compare what he says about African religions
with what he says about the religions of India. Here the aim
is simply to draw attention to the relative neglect of African
religions, not to suggest that anything said about India is, in
the correct context, incorrect or inappropriate. Anyone who
wishes to repeat this type of experiment using other religious
studies textbooks will find that they all treat African religions
in essentially the same way.
First, throughout his book Smart treats the diversity of
religion in the Indian subcontinent as an exciting and creative phenomena. But he dismisses African religious diversity,
arguing that African religion has never been a single system
and implying that this makes it inferior to historical world
Photo 2.3 This Coptic ikon came

from Upper Egypt, which most people
forget is part of Africa. In style it is
similar to many Ethiopian ikons and
can be seen as part of an ancient tra
dition belonging to a geographical
area that forms an arc from Ethiopia
to Italy. Many African Independent
Churches, south of the Sahara, have
also developed their own rich ikonic
traditions.
3. Ninian Smart, The Worlds Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989).
4. This argument was brief ly raised in my African Religions: Some Recent and Lesser Known Works, Religion 20 (1990): 36172. I also discussed it at greater length in my chapter African Religions and the Nature
of Religious Studies, in Religious Studies: Issues, Prospects and Proposals (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1991),
36179, which was based on a conference paper given at the University of Manitoba in 1988.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
religions.5 Second, he notes that Indians direct their worship toward a large number of
gods because God is described ... as taking many forms, with the result that the numerous gods become manifestations of the One Divine Being. Yet, although similar practices
may be observed in Africa, Smart says Africans enjoy a refracted theism, which he clearly
considers an inferior form of religious consciousness.6
Third, Smart says Indians possess a mythic system with a thousand themes. On the
other hand, equally rich African mythologies are reduced to myths of death and disorder,
to which trickster myths are added, as though these three themes exhausted African
mythic consciousness.7
Fourth, when discussing sacrifice in the Indian context, Smart tells us it is a central
ritual which must be interpreted as part of a vast system of interrelated beliefs. But in the
African context he dismisses
sacrifice: as elsewhere in the
world, it is a gesture of communication with god. 8 Recognizing that it was not Smarts
intention to denigrate African
religions, we must nevertheless
observe that his use of words is
unfortunate, suggesting very
clearly that African ritual sacrif ices are really not worth
serious consideration because
they simply duplicate things
that happen more interestingly
elsewhere.
Fifth, Smart says Indian
expressions of anthropomorphism represent a splendid act
of imagination, but he sees
African societies as possessing
Photo 2.4 Smart sees the many gods of India through the lens of Ve
anthropomorphic religions,
danta philosophy, which reduced them to one essential essence, but
when he looks at African religions, he sees many different gods. This is
which in the context of his dissimply inconsistent, because not all Hindus think that all the gods are
cussion appear rather limited
the same god. The above picture, from a Hindu temple, is of a small
and simplistic.9
altar with pictures. While it is permissible to look behind the gods of Hin
Of course some people will
duism to one God, the same courtesy ought to be extended to African
object to these comparisons
religions.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Smart, The Worlds Religions, 42, 310.

Ibid., 4547, 300.
Ibid., 47, 300310.
Ibid., 54, 302.
Ibid., 54, 299300.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
37
Photo 2.5 When Africans sacrifice, Smart and other writers

see it as simply another example of what people do elsewhere.
Thus they never bother to investigate what actually goes on or
to see African religion as at least on the same level as Indian
and other religious systems.
and attempt to dismiss them as trivial quibbles.

Surely, they will argue, one cannot compare African and Indian religious traditions, because African religions lack philosophic sophistication, while
Indian religions share a rich philosophical tradition.
Therefore, they will conclude, critical comments
about Smarts text are inappropriate. This argument
sounds good initially, but it can be questioned by
comparing what Smart, or almost any other religious
studies textbook writer, says about other religious
traditions which lack philosophical refinement. For
example, Smart comments favorably on Polynesian
religion, whereas in his section on Africa one finds
no appreciation at all. Polynesian myths, he argues,
express vast resources, but African myths simply
leave much to ref lect on.10
Sixth, in Smarts judgment African religions
have a particular problem in terms of their relation
to modern science and their potential to produce
the philosophical basis for religious pluralism.
On the other hand he gives a positive assessment
of Australian Aboriginal religion on these issues.11
Thus, when writing about Australian Aboriginal
society, which is a fragmented society far smaller
than almost any African society, Smart comments,
No doubt the Aborigines are on the verge of
(a new pan-Aboriginal religion) creating an ...
Photo 2.6 Overall the impression given in most text
books is that African religions are crude affairs led by
unsophisticated people. In reality many African religious
leaders are well-educated men and women. For exam
ple, before becoming a religious leader, Londa Shembe,
right, was a successful lawyer.
10. Ibid., 166, 531.
11. Ibid., 52931, 49495.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
all-embracing reaffirmation of values, helped too by the interpretation of Aborigine religion
created by writers on them, such as Mircea Eliade.12 Yet, for some reason, he feels that
African societies are on the whole too small to be able to bear the full impact of modern
social change.13
Seventh, while Smart acknowledges that Christ ianity had a long history in Africa
and that dynamic Christ ian movements have developed on the African continent, he
gives no hint that such church fathers as St. Augustine of Hippo and Tertullian were
African, and in all probability Black. As a result the encounter between Christ ianity and
African religion is seen as essentially a one-way transaction, with Africans adapting Chris
tianity to their needs but not really inf luencing the outside world.14
Yet it can be argued that the impact of Africa on Christ ianity is as great as the impact
of Christ ianity on Africa. For example, there is considerable evidence that the modern
charismatic movement was of African origin and that without an appreciation of African
culture one cannot really understand either classical or contemporary Christ ianity. Taking these considerations into account, it
is clear that in religious studies texts, like Smarts, African religions get a very raw deal. To understand this general neglect and
disparagement of African religion in the West, we need to look
at the treatment of Africa and Africans in European history and
European thought generally.
Africa before the Enlightenment
Photo 2.7 St. Maurice as de

picted in a statue from Magde
burg Dom (Cathedral). Quite
clearly the crusader in this sculp
ture is an African. Yet he stands in
the cathedral alongside Europe
ans as a great lord who is clearly
pious.
Prior to the Enlightenment, Africans were thought to have

much in common with Europeans. Indeed, in the eighteenth
century one Ghanaian, Anton Wilhelm Amo (17031759),
actually gained a considerable reputation as a rationalist philosopher and in 1737 was appointed lecturer (Privatdozent) at the
German University of Halle. He had graduated from Halle in
1727 and obtained his doctorate from the University of Wittenberg in 1734.15
Amo is but one of a number of Blacks who were well received
and respected in Europe before the Enlightenment. There is also
some evidence that Africans were regarded as a religious people
with a deep spirituality.16 All of this changed with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.
12. Ibid., 495.

13. Ibid., 529.
14. Ibid., 297, 51720, 52331.
15. Hans Werner Debrunner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe; A History of Africans in Europe before 1918
(Basel: Basler Africa Bibliographien, 1979), 107.
16. Debrunner, Presence and Prestige, 3536; Graham W. Irwin, Africans Abroad: A Documentary History of the Black
Diaspora in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean during the Age of Slavery (New York: Columbia Univ. Press,
1977), 3435.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
39
Africa and the Enlightenment

While it is usual to regard the Enlightenment as a period
of reform and progress, it was anything but progressive for
Blacks. A good case can be made that modern racism originates in the Enlightenment.17
The French philosopher Franois-Marie Arouet, known as
Voltaire (16941778), set the general tone of Enlightenment
attitudes to Africans. Although derogatory remarks may be
found throughout his work, his short essay The Negro18
outlined his position. He tells his readers, The NEGRO race
is a species of men as different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds ... if their understanding is not
of a different nature from ours, it is at least greatly inferior.
They are not capable of any great application or association of
Photo 2.8 Voltaire, the great phi
ideas, and seem formed neither of the advantages nor abuses
losopher of the Enlightenment, who
of our philosophy.19
was particularly unenlightened when
In another place Voltaire talks about uncultivated coasts
it came to Africans.
where Pelsart and his companions, in 1630, found black men
who walked on their hands as upon feet ... and
... a race of negros who had no fore teeth in their
upper jaws.20 More importantly, Voltaire advocated the theory of polygenesis, or the separate creation of different human races: You may, if you
please, reduce all mankind to one single species,
because they have the same organs of life, sense and
motion; but this species is evidently divided into
several others, whether we consider it in a physical or moral light.21 David Hume (17111776)
expressed similar views: I suspect that negroes ...
Photo 2.9 David Humes statue in his native city of Ed

inburgh, Scotland. Humes skeptical works on religion
were largely ignored during the period immediately af
ter his death, only to be taken up in the mid-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
17. George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978),
17, 1920.
18. Voltaire, The Negro, in The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William F. Fleming (London:
E. R. DuMont, 1901), 19:24042.
19. Ibid., 240.
20. Ibid., 268.
21. Ibid., 270.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white.22
Similarly, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778) is remembered for his attack on
slavery, it is forgotten that he also spoke quite freely of negroes and savages. In fact, when
Rousseaus views are examined in detail, his assessment of the noble savage mirrors modern racism. In his essay What Is the Origin of Inequality among Men, and Is It Authorized
by Natural Law?23 he wrote: We should beware, therefore, of confounding the savage
man with the men we have daily before our eyes. Nature treats all the animals left to her
care with a predilection ... By becoming domesticate they lose half these advantages ...
there is still a greater difference between savage and civilised man than between wild and
tame beasts ...24 These comments lead to the view that ... they [savages] go naked, have
no dwellings, and lack all superf luities which we think so necessary ... Their children are
slowly and with difficulty taught to walk.25
Such racist comments are followed by the observation that, Solitary, indolent, and
perpetually accompanied by danger, the savage cannot but be fond of sleep; his sleep too
must be light, like that of the animals ... Such in general is the animal condition, and
such, according to travellers, is that of most savage nations ...26 And again: Savage man
... must accordingly begin with purely animal functions ... being destitute of every species of intelligence ... his desires never go beyond his physical wants ... food, a female,
and sleep.27 Moving from the savage in particular to people in general, Rousseau says,
Everything seems removed from savage man ... He is so far from having the knowledge
which is needful to make him want more, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity
... He has not understanding enough to wonder at the great miracles; nor is it in his mind
that we can expect to find that philosophy man needs.28 After all of this, Rousseau makes
it quite clear that his savage is no abstract entity but can be identified with Africans in
particular.29
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (17241804) was more cautious in his essay On
the Different Races of Mankind.30 Nevertheless, he did appear to think that racial mixture was to be discouraged and laid a highly theoretical basis for segregation. With such
biased philosophical judgements behind him, the later German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (17701831) had no hesitation in saying, The peculiarly African
character is difficult to comprehend ... In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that
22. David Hume, Essays (London: Routledge and Sons, 1906), 152.
23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy of Dijon: What Is the Origin
of Inequality among Men, and Is It Authorized by Natural Law? in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans.
G. D. H. Cole, Everymans Library 660 (1913; New York: Dutton, 1966), 165.
24. Ibid., 168.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 169.
27. Ibid., 171.
28. Ibid., 172.
29. Ibid.
30. Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kants Werke, Band 2, Vorkritische Schriften (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1922).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
41
consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any

substantial objective existence ... The Negro, as already
observed, exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and
untamed state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and
morality. Among Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak,
or more strictly speaking, non-existent ... At this point we
leave Africa to mention it no more. For it is no historical part
of the World.31
From these examples it is clear that the leading figures of
the Enlightenment, and of the subsequent Romantic Movement, held a very low opinion of Africans. This explains not
only their failure to study African religion and society but also
the continuing neglect of such studies by their disciples and
eventually by the founders of religious studies such as Max
Mller. But is this the whole story?
Early-Nineteenth-Century
European Reactions to India
Photo 2.10 Bust of Hegel, for whom

Africa had no history. Without doubt
Hegel remains one of the most influ
ential of all philosophers. Although
his work has been largely ignored
by professional philosophers in the
English-speaking world, its influence
lies behind such movements as Marx
ism, postmodernism, and even some
forms of fascism.
In light of the reaction of Enlightenment thinkers to Africa

and Africans, it might be expected that similar attitudes would
have inf luenced European scholarly views of India. In fact,
during the early years of the nineteenth century there was
considerable anti-Indian propaganda. Popular accounts of
Africa and India, written by traders and missionaries, painted
equally bleak pictures of both continents and their peoples.32
James Mill (17731836), Thomas Babington Macaulay
(18001859), and a host of other experts considered Indian civilization degenerate and
described it in terms very similar to contemporary descriptions of African life.33 Nor did
the philosopher Hegel have much more use for India or Indian religions than he had for
Africa or its religions: Absolute Being is presented here in the ecstatic state of a dreaming
condition ... The Character of Spirit in a state of Dream, is the generic principle of the
Hindoo Nature ... which involves a monstrous bewilderment in regard to all phenomena and relations, we have already recognized as the principle of the Hindoo Spirit. The
Hindoo Mythology is therefore only a wild extravagance of Fancy ... Their whole life
and ideas are one unbroken superstition, because among them all is revere and consequent
enslavement.34 Here we have an attack on Hindu society and religion harsher than any
similar contemporary account of Africa.
31. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Willey Book Co., 1944).
32. Kenneth Ingham, Reformers in India (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), 154.
33. James Mill, The History of British India, abridged by William Thomas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1975), 13789; Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Glass Curtain between Asia and Europe (London: Oxford Univ. Press,
1965), 211.
34. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 13941, 155, 15758, 167.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Yet by the mid-nineteenth century the outlook of many Europeans had changed, and
India began to benefit from a growing appreciation of its religious and cultural heritage.
Clearly, Kantian philosophy, Hegelian dialectics, and other, similar forms of philosophical
idealism affected Western scholarly views of Indian religions,35 but Hegels disciples, and
thinkers such as Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860), who detested Hegel, were enthusiastic
about Indian thought.36
Africa Abandoned
No parallel appreciation of African values developed during the nineteenth century. In fact,
if anything, the descriptions of Africa and Africans written by European writers caused
Black Africans to sink lower and lower on the scale of humanity.37 Once again, it would
be easy to explain this devaluation of African life in terms of its primitive state as compared to the richness of Indian culture, especially Indian philosophy. Such an explanation
overlooks the fact that American Indians and similar groups did not suffer the same negative reactions by nineteenth-century writers as Africans did.38 Therefore it is increasingly
difficult not to see an element of racism in the neglect of African religions.39 The truth is
that the more one probes the treatment of Blacks and Black religions by Western scholars,
the more disturbing the issue becomes.40
The History of African Religions in Earlier

European Textbooks
The neglect of African religions by scholars is not a new phenomenon. A quick survey of
religious studies texts from an earlier era shows a similar disregard for African traditions
long before the growth of modern departments of religious studies.
In 1813John Belamy devoted fifteen pages of his History of All Religions41 to the religions of India and two pages to African religions, which he describes as paganism. A
few years later, in 1835, Charles A. Goodrich, in Religious Ceremonies and Customs, allowed
ten pages to the Hindoos and three pages to African Tribes.42 James Gardners popular Faiths of the World has many references to India and Indian deities, but avoids African
35. Ibid., 13981.
36. Joachim Deppert, ed., India and the West (New Delhi: Manohar, 1983), 22135; Arthur Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969); CarlT. Jackson, The Oriental Religions and
American Thought: Nineteenth-Century Explorations (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981), 4562.
37. Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, (Folkestone, U.K.: W. Dawson,
1980), 10956; Phillip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 37786.
38. Joseph R. Washington Jr., Anti-Blackness in English Religion: 15001800 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1984),
24, 349; Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, 23443.
39. Okot pBitek, African Religions in Western Scholarship (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1970).
40. Jordan, Comparative Religion; Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975);
Max Mller, Anthropological Religion, Gifford Lectures of 1891 (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), 28690.
41. John Bellamy, The History of All Religions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orm and Brown, 1813).
42. Charles A. Goodrich, Religious Ceremonies and Customs, or The Forms of Worship Practices by Several Nations of
the Known World, from the Earliest Records to the Present Time (Hartford: Hutchinson and Dwler, 1835).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
43
religions altogether.43 Later still (1883), James Clarkes Ten Great Religions shows a typical
disrespect for African religions. Unlike modern writers, Clarke does not hesitate to tell his
readers, The negroes of Africa have been charged with all sorts of vices and crimes ...
But it must be remembered that the negroes of whom we have usually heard have been for
centuries corrupted by the slave-traders ... Travellers who have penetrated the interior ...
have met with warm hospitality ... They have, in short, found the rudimentary forms of
the kingly and queenly virtues of truth and love, justice and mercy, united in the hearts of
these benighted heathens ... Such are the virtues which
already appear in primitive man, rudimentary virtues,
indeed ...44
No wonder that by the time of the World Congress
of Religions, in 1893, African religions had completely
disappeared from the vision of progressive scholars. As a
result the proceedings of the Congress give no attention
whatsoever to African religions. Early-twentieth-century
descriptions of African religions are equally prejudiced.
Edwin W. Smith, for example, in his tellingly entitled
book The Religion of Lower Races, as Illustrated by the African
Bantu, describes African religion as elementary and a
religion of fear.45
Clearly, the neglect of African religion and religions
has a long history. Modern textbooks, which almost
totally neglect African religion, are simply continuing
a two- hundred-year tradition deeply rooted in European racism. Consequently, when students read popular
textbook accounts of African religion or encounter its
almost total neglect, they quickly form the opinion that
Photo 2.11 The proceedings of the World
African religions are unworthy of serious study. Thus
Congress of Religions, held in Chicago in
1893. It claimed to represent all the religions of
existing textbooks confirm old prejudices and lead to
the world, but totally ignored African religions.
the further neglect of Africa by anyone interested in the
serious study of religion.
The Importance of Sacred Texts

Clearly, one reason why an appreciation of African religion did not develop in the nineteenth century is the unavailability of religious texts containing the scriptures of African
religions and the reliance of most scholars on written texts containing the scriptures of
various religions for their interpretation of religion. Although Indian texts, often directly
43. James Gardner, The Faiths of the World: A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Sects (Edinburgh: A. Fullarton, 1858).
44. James Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1883), 29394.
45. Edwin W. Smith, The Religion of Lower Races, as Illustrated by the African Bantu (New York: Macmillan, 1923),
23, 66.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
based upon oral traditions, were translated into first Latin and then German and English
during the early part of the nineteenth century, no similar translations were made of African traditions. Indeed, often all that Western scholars knew about African religions were
sensational accounts of primitive practices by traders and missionaries.
That Africa could have its own epics that might rival the Mahabharata, and that apparently irrational behavior, such as witchcraft, might have a logical basis simply did not occur
to nineteenth-century scholars.46 One need not argue that African epics are better or worse
than Indian epics. All that needs to be recognized is that in the nineteenth century very
few people, in Europe at least, took African oral traditions seriously.47
Indian religions, on the other hand, attained a respectability never attained by African
faiths.48 While James Mill could see Indian rituals as essentially expressions of barbaric
superstitions, scholars studying Indian beliefs slowly began to recognize an underlying
order behind the rituals. Indologists therefore began to attribute meaning to these apparently meaningless acts, thus weakening Mills arguments.49 Later intellectual movements
like Vedanta and, at a more popular level, Theosophy, which was founded in America in
the 1870s by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (18311891), allowed even the crudest ritual acts
to be reinterpreted in sophisticated ways.
But this is not all. The very fact of interpretation led to further refinement and produced
schools of apologists who saw in Indian religions an alternative to the spiritual bankruptcy
of the West.50 That the Buddhism of
C. A. F. Rhys-Davids (18571942) is
far removed from Buddhism as actually practiced by traditional Buddhists
is unimportant.51 To rephrase the well-
Photo 2.12 An African healer performing

a complex ritual in the Transkei. Although
religiously and numerically important, Af
rican religions have been mostly ignored
because the traditions they follow remain
largely oral rather than written.
46. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1937).
47. Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1979); Elizabeth Gunner, Forgotten Men: Zulu Bards and Praising at the Time of the Zulu Kings,
Langues Africaines [African Languages] 2 (1976): 7189; D. K. Rycroft and A. B. Ngcobo, eds., The Praises
of Dingana: Izibongo zikaDingana (Pietermaritzburg: Natal Univ. Press, 1988).
48. R. Radhakrishnan, Hinduism and the West, in Modern India and the West, ed. L.S.S. OMalley (London:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 33853; BruceF. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical
Movement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980).
49. M. E. Chamberlain, Britain and India: The Interaction of Two Peoples (Newton Abbot, U.K.: David & Charles,
1974), 8.
50. Carl T. Jackson, Oriental Religions and American Thought.
51. Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1957), 27.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
A Biased Canon
45
known comment by Karl Barth (18861968) on the famous German liberal theologian
Adolf von Harnack (18511930), in the nineteenth century Western orientalists looked
deep and long into the well of Indian spirituality and saw their own ref lection. One result
was the development of what we now know as religious studies, which highly prizes Indian
religions while almost totally disregarding African religions.
Conclusion
The examples presented in this chapter are so gross that it seems unbelievable that Black
Americans are not protesting loud and clear about the prejudice found in religious studies
texts. Yet they are not. This is probably because these prejudices are so deep and appear
so scholarly that no one really notices them. Instead they lie on the edge of the readers
consciousness.
Yet once the way African religions are treated in textbooks is realized, it becomes
possible to look out for similar biases elsewhere, and then it quickly becomes clear that
textbooks are full of bias and prejudice. We all notice these things at a subliminal level, but
few of us really trust our own judgment enough to point out the biased nature of textbooks.
Yet this is what we all must learn to do if scholarship in religious studies is to advance. So
the task is now handed over to you the reader. What biases can you find in the textbooks
you read?
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Part 2
African Traditions
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Chapter 3
African Religious
Traditions
Introduction
Although scholars may disagree about the exact nature of various religious traditions, there
is general agreement in religious studies textbooks about the existence of what may be
called the Great Traditions, or World Religions. These are usually listed as Buddhism,
Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, all of which have long histories
and written texts. Apart from these major traditions there are numerous smaller religious
traditions that are sometimes called traditional or primal religions because they are
usually found in non-Western societies that lack written scriptures. Probably the greatest
concentration of this type of religion is found in Africa.
Writing about African religions is like writing about European religions or
Indian religions. There are many very different African religious traditions; therefore,
it is impossible to speak about African religion without qualification. Here I offer an
overview of some common features of many different African religions. These shared
beliefs and practices, it should be noted, are often found in other traditional religions
throughout the world and are not exclusively African, although they take on a particular
form in Africa.1
Such religions lack written scriptures and recorded histories and often share a belief
in evil power identified with sorcery or witchcraft, specialized healers, psychic events,
and the importance of ancestors. Recognizing the similarity between such religions, John
Taylor identified them as primal religions, because in his view they draw on deep-rooted
primal, or basic, experiences common to all humans, experiences capable of being formed
into coherent ways of seeing the world. Although often very different from each other in
* Shortly before his final illness and death, Fred Welbourn and I planned to rewrite Atoms and Ancestors. For
a variety of reasons this was never done. This and the following chapter make extensive use of Welbourns
work.
1. For a critique of European scholarship on African religions, see Okot pBitek, African Religions in Western
Scholarship (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, n.d.). Although it was written over thirty years ago,
little has changed since then in the area of religious studies.
49
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#13 Africa
Africa (physical) (map 03-1)
(52%)
50 African Traditions
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Map 3.1 Map of Africa showing todays political divisions and the cities of Cape Town, Durban, Dar es Salaam,
Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, and Cairo. The borders of todays African states are outlined, and the name of each state is
given. Looking at this map, one gets an idea of the vastness of Africa in relation to Europe and the rest of the world.
detail, Taylor argued, African religious traditions share many common features that can be
seen as a worldview which may be identified as the primal vision.2
The study of African religions is difficult also because of the relative lack of interest in
the topic among religious studies scholars, as was shown in the last chapter. Consequently,
at present we simply cannot write an introductory section, like the one on the yogic tradition, outlining the history of African religions because at present the material for such a
chapter does not exist. As pointed out earlier, this is a result of the bias against things African in both scholarly discourse and popular culture. Hopefully, it will change in the future.
2. John V. Taylor, The Primal Vision: Christian Presence amid African Religion (London: SCM Press, 1963).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
African Religious Traditions
51
Photo 3.1 This famous painting, The Monk by the Sea (18081810) by Caspar David Friedrich
(17741840), captures the essence of the power of the primal over the human being. The monk stand
ing on the sea shore contemplating the vastness of the ocean and the sky evokes a sense of the fini
tude of life. The original may be seen in the Old National Gallery, Unter den Linden, Berlin, Germany.
The Primal Core

African traditional religions, like most grassroots religious movements, are based on the
religious experience of their founders and members. These religions may be called primal
religions, because they are essentially oral traditions that give primacy to the interpretation of experience rather than to a collection of sacred scriptures. Primal religions include
most African traditional religions, African Independent Churches, Native American religions, and many new religious movements in Western society.
Primal religions are identifiable with what Robert Redfield calls little traditions,
where charismatic experiences, healings, prophecies, visions, and so on are the principal
concern of devotees. In primal religions shamans or similar ritual figures communicate
between this world and the next, often with the aim of placating the ancestors.
At the core of all primal religions are primal experiences. These are intense experiences
which defy rational explanation. Primal experiences are unexpected vivid encounters so
unusual that they can be explained only by reference to a religious mythology. Such experiences take many forms. Above all, they shock those who experience them, bringing about a
change in their attitude toward the material world. Primal experiences involve such things
as dreams, visions, voices, spiritual healings, a sense of presence or awe, notions of destiny,
sightings of the dead, and inexplicable spiritual phenomena.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Primal experiences are important for African religious movements because they affirm
the reality of traditional mythologies and the foundation myths of new religious movements like the amaNazaretha. Before a person has a primal experience, he or she may view
the traditional mythology, or myths of a particular new religious movement, as unbelievable fairy tales which only uneducated traditionalists believe. Following a primal experience, the old ways, or teachings, of a new religion become a reality.
As it turns out, primal experiences are remarkably common among humans. In the 1970s
David Hay became interested in the phenomenon when some postgraduate students at the
University of Nottingham, England, responding to a social survey, admitted that they had
had primal experiences that profoundly affected their outlook. The majority of these students
said that they had no adequate explanation for their experience and would welcome one. Following this initial survey, Hay and Ann Morisy arranged a statistically valid national survey
of the British population. In this more qualified survey they found that 36.4 percent of those
included in the random sample reported having had such experiences. Significantly, 45 percent
of those who had these experiences had no real contact with churches or organized religions.3
In a national survey in the United States, some 30 percent of Americans responded positively to questions about primal experiences. A much higher figure was obtained by Robert
Wuthnow in his survey of the San Francisco Bay area population. There Wuthnows positive
Religious Traditions and Primal Experiences
Primal Traditions
Primal Experiences
African Religions
Dreams and Visions
Confucianism
Prophecies
Native American Traditions
Healings
Shamanism
Revelations
New Religions
Miracles
Revitalization Movements
Voices
Ghosts
Figure 3.1 Primal religions are those that generally lack strong written traditions or rigidly orga
nized priesthoods. Instead they rely on direct experiences of the supernatural, which, it must be
stressed, is always seen as a natural continuation of this life.
3. David Hay, Reports of Religious Experiences by a Group of Postgraduate Students: A Pilot Study, and
Religious Experiences among a Group of Postgraduate Students: A Qualitative Survey, unpublished
papers presented at the Colloquium on Psychology and Religion, Lancaster University, 1975; David Hay
and Ann Morisy, Reports of Ecstatic Paranormal or Religious Experiences in Great Britain and the United
States: A Comparison of Trends, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 1/7 (1978): 25565.
2/1/11 10:15 AM

response rate went up to 50 percent.4 In Canada,
Reginald Bibby found that 60 percent of Canadians reported postively when asked about primal
experiences. All of this evidence suggests, Bibby
observed, a pool of religiosity that is largely
untapped by established religions.5
Similar findings have been reported from
other parts of the world. In his studies of hundreds of Zulu in South Africa, for example,
S.G. Lee reports that before individuals became
diviners, they reported a variety of primal experiences, including numerous visual and auditory
hallucinations. Fifteen percent reported a history
of possession experiences that involved fatigued
states, hallucinations, dreaming, and so on. Seventeen percent reported diseases that they attributed to sorcery. The difference between those
who merely consulted diviners and those who
actually became diviners was largely a matter of
the severity of their condition. Chronic or severe
sufferers went through rigorous, six-month-long
initiations, and converted from client to diviner.6
Understanding
Traditional Societies
53
Photo 3.2 A Zulu becomes a diviner

after an intense primal experience fol
lowed by a long apprenticeship with
an established diviner. The man shown
above is in the process of becoming a
fully fledged diviner. Each white bead in
his braided hair represents a successful
healing.
To understand traditional religions, particularly

African religions, it is necessary to suspend judgment as to which view of the universethe secular, traditional, modern Christian, or any other
alternative viewis true. We must enter as fully as possible into the perspective of someone
living in a traditional society which sees all phenomena as an expression of mysterious power.
But to do so we need to understand not only the thought world of traditional people, but also
their traditional social order. This exercise will cause us to ref lect on our own society and
4. Robert Wuthnow, Experimentation in American Religion: The New Mysticisms and Their Implications for the
Churches (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), 6465, 100.
5. Reginald Bibby, Religionless Christ ianity: A Profile of Religion in the Canadian 80s, Social Indicators
Research13 (1983): 116. See also Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), 32545; Alister Hardy, The
Spiritual Nature of Man (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).
6. S.G. Lee, Spirit Possession among the Zulu, in Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa, ed. John Beattie
and John Middleton (New York: Africana, 1969), 2855. See also S.G. Lee, A Study of Crying Hysteria
and Dreaming in Zulu Women (PhD diss., University of London, 1954); and Max Khler, The Izangoma
Diviners, trans. and ed. N.J. van Warmelo (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1941).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Photo 3.3 and 3.4 Traditional African

life in South Africas Transkei in the 1970s
was hard and in many ways close to the
way people lived in biblical times. Con
sequently, Africans saw in the message of
the Bible a reflection of their own personal
realities. Note the hard labor of the woman
and that the oxen are drawing a sledge,
not a wheeled vehicle.
our most dearly held beliefs, and then

to agree with Shakespeares Hamlet
that there are more things in heaven
and earth, Horatio, / than are dreamt
of in your philosophy.7
Explaining Primal
Experiences
In his book Atoms and Ancestors,8 Fred Welbourn
pointed out that until recently few Europeans
or North Americans had seen bacteria. In fact,
he argued, we rarely think about bacteria unless
there is an outbreak of disease that we believe
they have caused. It is equally significant that
even today many people do not realize that bacteria not only cause illness, but are also essential
to healthy organic life. The truth is that if we
have to think about bacteria at all, whether we
want to know how to kill the malign variety that
cause dysentery, or to increase their benign activity in a compost heap, we do so because
we see them at work. Normally, however, we simply take the existence of bacteria on trust.
Yet for the last hundred years most people in the West, if challenged, would have said
that bacteria are a natural and inescapable part of life. They are something which pervades
our environment, yet which we normally do not think about and only very rarely see.
Only when they begin to cause problems do we consult specialists who can heal illness or
tell us why our compost heap is not working properly.
Similarly, people living in traditional societies, like the Zulu in South Africa, often
claim to have seen an Ancestor, or what in the West we call a ghost. Among the Zulu, and
7. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5.16667.
8. Fred B. Welbourn, Atoms and Ancestors (London: Edwin Arnold, 1968). This and the next chapter are a revision of Welbourns work, as agreed with him before he died. Welbourns East African Rebels (London: SCM
Press, 1961) is a classic study of African Independent Churches that also throws light on traditional religions.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
55
many other African groups, Ancestors are not expected to be seen. They work in other
ways and are experienced as part of everyday life. Yet they are rarely thought about unless,
like bacteria, they begin to cause problems. Among the Ganda, sometimes called the
Baganda, of Uganda, custom directs that shrines to the dead should be tended regularly, yet
they are usually neglected unless the ghost of the deceased causes trouble. Likewise, people
in Zulu homesteads only think about deceased Ancestors when problems arise in daily life.
The benign activity of ghostsor Ancestors, as both the Ganda and Zulu call themis
taken for granted in most traditional societies. Therefore, Ancestors are hardly mentioned
except on very special occasions. When an outbreak of disease occurs or misfortunes continually arise, a specialist is consulted. Like the Western medical specialist or horticultural expert,
Africans who know how to communicate with the Ancestors to bring healing or good fortune are highly prized. They are specialists, or people with a calling who have entered their
profession after a long training and many years of study. And as with the Western specialist,
the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If health and good fortune are restored, then it
is clear that the specialist has placated the
Ancestors, whose activity is beyond doubt.
Sometimes, however, Ancestors are
experienced in a much more frightening
way. When interviewed by the author,
Estelle Nxele, a Zulu woman in Natal,
South Africa, described her encounter with
them as follows: In nineteen sixty-six my
spirit came up very strong. At work I used
to have a bad, sharp headache. In one minute, it would come up like a balloon. Just
like a balloon. I couldnt see. The doctor
was frightened to give me an injection,
gave me pills for pain. They sent me home
and I slept. The next day, I was all right.
Then when I was sleeping here, I could
hear people talking, but I was sleeping like
a dream. I used to see them when I was
sleeping. They talked to me, my grandfathers and my granny too. This is how
youyoure going to help people. That is
what they told me.
As a result of this and many other very
frightening experiences, Estelle eventually sought the serv ices of a specialist who
could deal with her African disease. It
got its name from the fact that it had defied
Photo 3.5 Estelle Nxele dressed in preparation for a heal
the efforts of Western doctors to find a
ing ceremony at her home near Durban, South Africa.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
cure. Even though she was a baptized Christ ian, she went to a traditional Zulu diviner.
The diviner explained that Estelle had received a call from the Ancestors and that in
consequence she must not wear Western shoes or enter a church building. She also had to
undergo years of rigorous training before she too became a well-respected diviner who
practiced the old ways of healing through communication with the Ancestors. On the
other hand, she could remain a Christ ian provided she did not go into a church building,
which the Ancestors found frightening. Despite this restriction on Estelles behavior, her
children and grandchildren were encouraged to go to church.
The Secular and the Sacred

Behind this type of experience lies a deep division between the way most Western people
see the world and the way traditional Africans see the world. Western people tend to
think of the natural and supernatural as two entirely different realms. As a result
many people find it extremely difficult to believe that any form of reality exists beyond
what is directly observed by our senses. But, as we shall see, what is reality, how it is
best observed, and what counts as sense experience are not easy questions to answer.
In most traditional African thought, there is nothing more natural than the supernatural.
Any attempt to understand the religious experience of traditional Africans must, therefore,
begin by suspending our normal educated, secular, but not particularly Christ ian, idea
that the natural and supernatural are different.9
Traditional Africans, such as the Baganda and Zulu peoples, do not make distinctions between the natural and supernatural. This means they do not recognize a distinction between the secular and the sacred. Yet the idea of the sacred or holy is deeply
ingrained in religious studies.
A good example of the way the sacred plays a key role in religious studies can be
found in James C. Livingstons popular Anatomy of the Sacred: An Introduction to Religion:
most scholars today agree that religion is a system of activities and beliefs directed toward
that which is perceived to be sacred ... Here we shall discuss the sacred or the holy as the
root of religious experience and practice.10
After a short discussion he introduces students to the work of the Dutch scholar Gerardus van der Leeuw11 with the comment that van der Leeuw points to the preconceptual
experience of sacred power as the root of all religion.12 Livingston then argues that the
root of the experience of the sacred is summed up by Rudolf Otto in his classic and inf luential study The Idea of the Holy,13 where it is a category of interpretation and valuation
peculiar to the sphere of religion ...14 Developing his argument, Livingston goes on to
cite Mircea Eliade as a scholar whose work generally supports that of Otto. He argues that
9. See Harriet Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine (London: Academic Press, 1977).
10. James C. Livingston, Anatomy of the Sacred: An Introduction to Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 47.
11. Ibid., 48.
12. Ibid., 4748.
13. Ibid., 50.
14. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1923), 5.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
57
Photo 3.6 Sociologist mile Durkheim made the sacredsecular distinction basic to his definition of religion. In do
ing so he appealed to the religion of Australian Aborigines,
even though he had never visited Australia or had direct
contact with Aborigines. As a result, he constructed an ap
pealing theory on the basis of secondhand observations
and theoretical speculation.
Eliade improves on Ottos insights by utilizing

mile Durkheims fundamental contrast between
the sacred and the profane.15
The popularization of Durkheims, Ottos, van
der Leeuws, and Eliades ideas about the sacredsecular distinction has been accepted without
question by most Western scholars. Today this distinction is seen by most writers as the fundamental
category of religious thought.16 Yet, as we have just
argued, this fundamental contrast is absent from most African religious systems. This
means that the study of African religions forces us to rethink popular interpretations of
religion. It also means that we must pay attention to empirical evidence rather than theorizing about the way we think religion and religious people ought to behave.
Problems with the Sacred-Secular Distinction

Durkheim developed his theory about the origins of religion from a sharp distinction he
claimed to observe between the sacred and the secular in the most primitive and simple
religion which is actually known ...17 Starting from a theory of the Holy which he
found in William Robertson Smiths Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental
Institutions,18 Durkheim read many works on totemism, particularly among Australian
Aborigines, to develop his own wide-ranging theory, which he published in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.
Similarly, Otto, van der Leeuw and Eliade used a wide range of documentary sources
to develop their own contributions to the theory of religion as a manifestation of the
sacred. Although Otto alludes to Kant and to the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher
(17681834), he never really outlines his own methodology.19 By contrast, van der Leeuws
15. Livingston, Anatomy of the Sacred, 55.
16. E.g., David S. Noss and John B. Noss, Mans Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 10; Denise Lardner
Carmondy and John Tully Carmondy, Ways to the Center: An Introduction to World Religions (Belmont, Calif.:
Wadsworth, 1984), 45.
17. mile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1915; repr., 1964).
18. Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), 14445; William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The
Fundamental Institutions (1889; repr., London: A & C. Black, 1927).
19. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Technique of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
approach is essentially similar to that of Eliade, who clearly states in the introduction to his
Shamanism: Archaic Technique of Ecstasy 20 that he is not interested in history as practiced
by historians but rather in the history of religion,21 which he defines as a hierophany
realized at a certain historical moment[which] is structurally equivalent to a hierophany
a thousand years earlier or later.22
The problem with all of these approaches is that they impose a preexisting theory on
the empirical data. Durkheim, Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade knew what they would
find with regard to the sacred before they ever opened a book to prove their theories. And
none of them, despite Durkheims reputation as a sociologist, did fieldwork. Commenting on Durkheims study, the great British social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard
writes, Durkheims theory is more than just neat; it is brilliant and imaginative, almost
poetical ... While various logical and philosophical objections could be raised, I would
rather base the case for the prosecution on ethnographical evidence. Does this support the
rigid dichotomy he makes between the sacred and profane? I doubt it. Surely what he calls
sacred and profane are on the same level of experience, and, far from being cut off from
one another, they are so closely intermingled as to be inseparable.23
What is more, Evans-Pritchard points to Durkheims selective use of Australian evidence
and his clear misunderstanding of how sacred objects are treated in practice. Jim Bellis
illustrated this issue very well in relation to the sacred drums of the Ashanti of West Africa.
According to many accounts, the Ashanti regard their drums with awe because the Ancestors
speak through them. But Bellis points out that in everyday life the drums are neglected and
often treated quite badly until the occasion arises when they are needed. Then, and only then,
do they become objects of power. As soon as communication with the Ancestors is broken,
however, the drums revert to their former low status. An extreme example of Ashanti disregard for the sacred nature of the drums is found in the following story.24
During a battle between the Ashanti and another group of warriors, a group of Ashanti
were cut off from the main force. Things looked desperate, so the Ashanti used their drums
to appeal for help from the Ancestors. When no help was forthcoming, the Ashanti urinated over the drums to show their contempt for the stubborn refusal of their Ancestors
to come to their aid; then the warriors fought their way through enemy lines to rejoin the
main force. Such coarse treatment of sacred objects does not fit any model created by
Durkheim, Otto, van der Leeuw, or Eliade.
From these comments it seems safe to conclude that if the reality of African religion
contradicts some pet theories current in religious studies departments, it is because those
theories are f lawed in their very essence. The problem, simply stated, is that Durkheim,
Otto, van der Leeuw, and Eliade were armchair theorists. They analyzed written texts. But
20. Ibid., xvi.
21. Ibid., xvii.
22. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 6465.
23. The preceding passage and following story are based on a lecture given by Bellis during his visit to the
University of Calgary in 1988.
24. Note that traditional African cosmologies refer to God as him or it; they do not see God in feminine
terms. See, e.g., Gabriel M. Setiloane, The Image of God among the Sotho-Tswana (Rotterdam: Balkema, 1976).
2/1/11 10:15 AM
59
to study African religions meaningfully we must move beyond the text to the life experience of living p eople.
The Reality of Power

It is important, however, to note that when we say traditional Africans do not recognize
the distinction between the secular and the sacred, we are not denying that in the thought
of many African societies a hierarchy of power exists. The creator God, if there is a belief
in him or it, is the source of this power, as he or it is the source of all things. But power is
found, in descending order, in lesser
spirits, in ancestral ghosts, in chiefs
(often the focus of communication
with the spirits), and in witches
and sorcerers. Finally, it occurs in
ordinary men and women, animals,
plants, and inanimate things.
Sometimes this power is personalized. Both the Baganda and
the Zulu, for instance, have many
stories of pregnant girls, deserted
by their lovers, who gave birth to
water instead of a child. The water
became a river, and in this way the
girls spirit catches unwary travelers
and drowns them. In other cases the
power takes on animal form. Thus
in one Ugandan village there lived a
leopard which kept the local people
under its care and warned them if
Photo 3.7 A traditional Xhosa man and his wife. Notice the hier
other leopards were coming to steal
archy of power implied by his riding a horse while she walks behind
their stock. Villagers could visit the
him.
leopards lair without fear of being
molested, and, to prove the point,
one student from Makerere University actually took an unwitting Fred Welbourn with him
to see the leopard. Although Fred got the fright of his life when he realized what he was
facing in that dark cave, the leopard ignored its visitor, and Fred lived to tell the tale.
Telepathy and Technique

Sometimes the power can to be put into things. For example, among the Ganda, an animals
horn, when filled with suitable ingredients and empowered by a spirit, could be used by its
owner to do jobs for him at a distance. It could also speak to him secret messages and enable
him to communicate with others over vast distances. A similar belief, rationalized in terms
of telepathy, can be found among traditional, white South Africans known as Afrikaners.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
Photo 3.8 On 4 November 1980, the day before the

crucial American election that brought Ronald Reagan
to power, the New York newspaper News World went
out on a limb to predict a Reagan victory. Its headline
read, Reagan landslide: Will win by more than 350
electoral votes and carry New York as well. This lead
story was dictated to the editor by Sun Myung Moon,
who owned the newspaper. He claimed to have had a
vision that gave him the election results. In the event,
Rev. Moons forecast was remarkably accurate. Did this
show a keen political understanding that professional
forecasters lacked, or was it a premonition, as Rev.
Moons followers claimed?
When I interviewed the brilliant Afrikaner

philosopher, H. G. Stoker, in 1972, he told the
following story: When I was a young student at
Potchefstroom University in 1914, I had a friend
who was very homesick. Each Sunday afternoon
he would go out into the veld and sit under a particular tree from where he communicated with his
twin brother in the town of Uitenhage hundreds
of miles away. His brother also sat under the same
type of tree on the family farm. This was done by
telepathy. But the tree had something to do with
it, even though I do not understand quite what it
was. Somehow it seemed to amplify his thoughts.
As a Christ ian, Professor Stoker found no difficulty accepting this story. Indeed he
knew that it was true. As a skeptical Englishman I was incredulous. But, as Stoker said,
with a twinkle in his eye, that was because I had just arrived in Africa. Almost forty years
later, I am more inclined to agree with him.
Patterns of Power
At other times the power is inherent. Among the Buganda a man who killed the animal
after which his clan is named was believed to have killed his clan totem, and when he
died immediately afterward, his death was regarded as punishment. If a pregnant woman
laughed at a lame person, her child would be born lame. If a sheep, a goat, or a dog got
onto the roof of a house, the inhabitants would leave it at once, saying it was unlucky to
live there. All these things were taboo and in many ways ref lect similar folk traditions
in Europe and America.
Traditional Africans describe this power as an all-pervasive psychic force behaving
very much like electricity is believed to behave in our society. People and things which
are positively charged with power can pass it on by contact to anyone who is negatively charged. Unless this process is properly controlled, damage will result. A positively
2/1/11 10:15 AM

charged chief, for instance, might come into contact with a
commoner. The chief loses some of his power, but the commoner is injured.
Although not usually recognized by most Westerners
who read the Bible, an example of power very similar to that
accepted by many Africans and other traditional peoples seems
to be reported in the Bible in 2Samuel 6:69: When they
came to the threshing f loor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and
took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. The
Lords anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent
act; therefore God struck him down and he died there by the
ark of God. Then David was angry because the Lords wrath
had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is
called Perez Uzzah. David was afraid of the Lord that day and
said, How can the ark of the Lord ever come to me?
No wonder so many Africans and other traditional peoples
look to the Bible for inspiration and see in it a ref lection of
their own life and experience. The truth is that at their core
the religious practices of the Bible are very similar to the
everyday practices found in numerous African traditional
religions. To recognize these similarities, however, we have
to strip away many of our exclusively Western, particularly
Enlightenment, methods of interpretation.
61
Photo 3.9 The leader of an Afri

can Independent church prepares to
perform a baptism ceremony in the
sea near Durban. The red and white
cords around his neck and body are
believed to give him the power to
ward off evil spirits that seek to pre
vent baptism.
Atoms, Electricity, and Unseen

Powers
The electrical metaphor, which was a brilliant insight by Fred Welbourn, can be used to
illuminate the relation between the natural and supernatural. The British physicist
Sir Arthur Eddington once pointed out that a physicists description of matter in terms of
electrons and protons might easily give the impression that a chair consists largely of wideopen space. Thus when a child is first taught physics, they might be tempted to think that
a particular chair which was described as made of electrons is unsuitable for sitting. The
commonsense account of the same chair, however, is entirely different, and the child sits
in the chair without hesitation. In everyday life, therefore, we follow the commonsense
account, which normally disregards the electrical basis of matter.
Electrical forces, however, become of concern to common sense in Western society
when they are not properly controlled, for example, when lightning strikes. Therefore,
when electricity is harnessed for human welfare, special care must be taken to produce
effects that are both safe and impossible without it. To harness electricity requires the
knowledge and skill of specialists. But, even though lightning may be extremely frightening, Western people do not regard it as supernatural. They recognize that electricity is an
inescapable part of their natural environment with special powers for good or ill.
2/1/11 10:15 AM
This analogy illustrates the
way traditional Africans and
other traditional peoples understand the power which operates
through their Ancestors, ghosts,
and the spirits. Such power
underlies all life, but common
sense normally disregards it.
When out-of-the-way things
happen, or when a person needs
special power for a particular purpose, for example, to deal with
misfortune or to seek unusual
success, he or she becomes aware,
as we become aware of electricity, of something which he or she
Photo 3.10 A picture of the computer screen linked to the computer
believes to be around him or her
on which this book was written. We all know how computers work.
and available all the time.
But how many people really know how they work? Very few people un
To appreciate what this means
derstand the complex physics and mathematical calculations that make
in
practice,
it is necessary to reccomputers possible.
ognize that when ghost stories are
told in Western societyand we must remember that
there are sane and intelligent Westerners who believe
in ghoststhere is usually an atmosphere of horror. In
the West ghosts are usually malicious.
But in many traditional societies, ghosts are felt
to be an integral part of society, deeply concerned
for its welfare, interfering, it is true, if they do not
receive the attention which is their due, but expecting to play their part in its smooth running. Most
traditional African, and other, ghosts carry over into
the next world the characteristics that they acquired
in this. Thus, a man caught thieving might ask to
be killed rather than have his hand cut off, lest he
should enter maimed into the world of ghosts.
Therefore, among the Ganda, it was not surprising that the ghost of a paternal aunt, always in life an
Photo 3.11 Marleys ghost is probably the best-known
ghost in English literature, with the possible exception of
the ghost of Hamlets father. What do these stories tell us
about European attitudes to ghosts?
2/1/11 10:15 AM
63
oppressive, authoritarian figure, was frequently thought to be the cause of sickness. Among
the Zulu the ghosts of fathers and grandfathers, who in life expected respect, also became
angry if their memory and wishes were not respected. In a similar vein, special precautions
were taken to avoid the ghosts of people with abnormalities and people who had been
social misfits. Ghosts, in other words, easily become the source of danger and evil.
The Presence of Evil

To understand this way of thinking in Western terms, consider the popular TV series
Doctor Who. The BBC began broadcasting the show on childrens television in 1963.
In North America, Doctor Who films became late-night adult viewing. Recently the
original scripts of the series were turned into paperback books, and most of the shows
are available on DVDs in public libraries. This television series develops the theme of
the misuse of electrical and atomic power by evil men, a theme found in many science
fiction stories. The shows popularity suggests that in the popular imagination a fear of
unseen forces like electricity and atomic power that is not unlike traditional fears about
ghosts still survives.
A faulty cord on an electric iron may give a fatal shock. The atom can be used to produce electricity or an atomic bomb. So, too, a man or woman in a traditional society who
can control power may be feared as well as admired. If they can use power to improve their
own crops or those of others, their help may be sought. Alternatively, such a person may
use their power to harm others.
Among the Lugbara of Uganda, a man who consistently has better crops than his neighbors is liable to be accused of witchcraft and punished. In the nineteenth century among
the Zulu, enterprising young men who worked in white towns such as Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, and saved their earnings to buy plows were also accused of witchcraft,
because the plow enabled them to cultivate far more land than their neighbors, and their
material success was then interpreted by their neighbors as witchcraft. As a result many
had to f lee for their lives and ended up living in mission stations under the protection of
missionaries. In Africa it is sometimes dangerous to be excellent.
Traditional Beliefs and Modern Medicine

The attitudes of African and many other traditional peoples to modern medicine can be
summed up by the following story. In the 1970s tuberculosis was a major problem in the
Madlawani district of South Africas Transkei. Although the area had an excellent teaching hospital, funded by the Dutch Reformed Church and staffed by Dutch and Afrikaner
doctors, TB remained endemic. The major problem was that most Africans who contracted
TB went to see local healers before attending the white hospital. As a result they came to
hospitals months, sometimes years, after contracting the disease, when it was much harder,
if not impossible, to treat.
To overcome this problem the doctors, in cooperation with the missionary doctor,
Hennie Pretorius, devised a scheme whereby they cooperated with local healers. Instead
of condemning African healers as superstitious charlatans, as many whites had done in
2/1/11 10:15 AM
the past, Pretorius and the doctors at the
hospital acknowledged the value of local
healers and traditional medicines. They
also conceded the psychological value of
visits to traditional healers. Therefore, they
embarked on a campaign to win over the
healers through mutual respect and cooperation. The essence of this campaign was
to admit that African healers could help
TB victims with psychic problems caused
by the anger of ghosts, but that the white
doctors were able to cure the symptoms.
This approach to a deadly disease worked
remarkably well, as the healers learned to
identify the symptoms of TB and send their
patients to the hospital for further help.
For this approach to work, the docPhoto 3.12 An African patient with severe TB is exam
ined by a Dutch doctor at Madlawani Hospital, Transkei,
tors had to set aside their skepticism about
South Africa, in 1974. The scars on the mans skin were
ghosts and other psychic forces. Instead they
made over many months as the man was treated by an
allowed their patients to believe whatever
African healer. In this case the delay in his receiving West
they wanted about the ultimate cause of
ern medical attention created a grave risk to the mans
their illnesses and concentrated on treating
health.
their medical causes. For most of the Africans who came for help, ghosts and psychic agents were the primary cause of their sickness.
Yet even traditional healers admitted that although ghosts and other forces accounted for
sickness, and their rituals freed patients from the power of such evil forces, there was still
a need to cure the material expression of such attacks. It was here that Western medicine
could be useful. To appreciate the implications of these ideas we must attempt to understand the role of witchcraft and sorcery in traditional societies. It is to this task we now
turn.
2/1/11 10:15 AM

Understanding World Religions by Irving Hexham

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Crisp, comprehensive, packed with unusual insights, and refreshing in style, Hexhams

This is not the conventional or predictable textbook on world religions. As a good

About This Book

Photo 1.1 This small side shrine is part of

Ninian Smarts Model for Identifying Religion

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

When all of these features are found together in

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Photo 1.5 Mircea Eliade in discussion with graduate students

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Some Objections to Smarts Views

The Ontological Understanding of Religion

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Dooyeweerd: Ground Motives and

Photo 1.7 Fred Welbourn, who pio

Another approach to study of religion is found in the writings

Explicit or Implicit Religion

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Methods for the study of religion

Operationalizing Definitions of Religion

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Photo 1.10 Rodney Stark, who is arguably the lead

Religious Studies: Field or Discipline

Practical methods for the study of religion

Introductory Issues in the Study of Religion

Photo 2.2 At first glance

African Religions in the Context of World

World Religions 1905

World Religions 2005

Christianity 2.1 billion

Textbook Portrayals of African

Photo 2.3 This Coptic ikon came

Smart, The Worlds Religions, 42, 310.

Photo 2.5 When Africans sacrifice, Smart and other writers

and attempt to dismiss them as trivial quibbles.

Africa before the Enlightenment

Photo 2.7 St. Maurice as de

Prior to the Enlightenment, Africans were thought to have

12. Ibid., 495.

Africa and the Enlightenment

Photo 2.9 David Humes statue in his native city of Ed

consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any

Photo 2.10 Bust of Hegel, for whom

In light of the reaction of Enlightenment thinkers to Africa

The History of African Religions in Earlier

The Importance of Sacred Texts

Photo 2.12 An African healer performing

Africa (physical) (map 03-1)

NOTE: Modern-day boundaries shown

SAO TOME &

African Religious Traditions

The Primal Core

Dreams and Visions

Native American Traditions

African Religious Traditions

Photo 3.2 A Zulu becomes a diviner

To understand traditional religions, particularly

Photo 3.3 and 3.4 Traditional African

our most dearly held beliefs, and then

African Religious Traditions