Approaches to

Religious Studies

By Kwan Shui-man
 Class Discussion

What is Religion?
 Some definitions
• Religion is the sigh of the hard-pressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, the soul of souless circumstances. It
is the opium of the people. (Marx)
• A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices
relative to sacred things - that is to say, things set apart
and forbidden - beliefs and practices which unite into one
single moral community all those who adhere to them.
(Durkheim)
• A system of symbols which acts to establish powerful,
pervasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men
by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence
and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of
factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely
realistic (Geertz)
• Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it,
shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of
individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may
consider the divine (William James)
• "Religious ideas...are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest,
strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind...(They are)
born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable
and built up from the material of memories of the
helplessness of his own childhood and the childhood of the
human race."
Religion is "the universal obsessional neurosis of
humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it
arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the
father." (Freud)
• Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate
concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as
preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the
question of the meaning of our life. (Tillich)
• Ninian Smart’s 7 dimensions (The
World’s Religions)
1. Practical or Ritual Dimension
2. Experiential and Emotional Dimension
3. Narrative or Mythic Dimension
4. Doctrinal and Philosophical Dimension
5. Ethical and Legal Dimension
6. Social and Institutional Dimension
7. Material Dimension
Religious Studies as Polymethodical
• Anthropological approaches
• Feminist approaches
• Phenomenological approaches
• Philosophical approaches
• Psychological approaches
• Sociological approaches
• Theological approaches
 Anthropological feminist

sociological

Practical or Ritual Dimension psychological

phenomenological
philosophical
 Psychological Approach
• The “hard” end:
• Physiological psychology
• Behaviourism
• Cognitive psychology
• Social psychology
• The “soft” end
• Psychodynamic schools
• Humanistic psychologies
• Existential psychologies
• Transpersonal psychologies
• The “hard” end—concerns
• Religious attitudes—religious inclinations, religious
values, social-religious-political attitudes, religious
concerns…
• Religious orientations—motivation (intrinsic vs
extrinsic), proneness to religious beliefs
• Religious development—depth of religious experience,
faith development/maturity…
• Religious commitment and involvement
• Religious/Moral values or personal characteristics
• Religious coping and problem-solving
• Spirituality and mysticism
• God-Concept
 Some Examples of Psychological Studies
of Religion
1. Jay L. Wenger, “Implicit Components of
Religious Beliefs”
-the emergence of beliefs
Dual Process Theories
Experiment
Subliminal
Priming
Controlled Automatic Procedure
process process
Automatic
explicit Implicit activiation
process process
Spontaneous
application
Slow and Fast and
Conscious nonConscious Religious
Beliefs
Some Examples of Psychological Studies of
Religion
2. The Heuristic of Representativeness (e.g. Daniel
Kahneman & Amos Tversky, “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of
Representativeness”)
- the maintenance of beliefs
•e.g. God’s Act!
Among the 23, Highly
my birthday is your representative
(like goes with
birthday! like)
Not random

The probability
of having a 343 days left
birthday ＝ Highly without any birthday
23/365 = 1/16 non-
representative
 Some Examples of Psychological
Studies of Religion

3. Self-Disclosure and Prayer (e.g.

– Expresssion of Insights
– Expression of Negative Emotions
– Expression of Positive Emotion
– Causal Expressions
• Some Theoretical Concerns
• Origin of Religion (e.g. evolutionary theory:
hypnotizability and Shamanic Trance)
• Why do people believe? (e.g. low cognitive
ability, high stress level…etc.)
• How are Beliefs sustained?
• How are Beliefs discarded/changed?
 Anthropological Approach
• 3 stages of thematic and theoretical focus
• General sequence of thematic focus
• Origin > Function > Meaning > ...
• 1860s-1900
• Study of origin
• Evolutionism
• Tylor, Robertson Smith, Frazer, Spencer, Durkheim
• 1900-1950
• Study of function
• Functionalism
• Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard
• 1950-1980s
• Study of meaning
• Interpretive anthropology, symbolist anthropology,
(structuralism)
• Evans-Pritchard, Geertz, Douglas, Leach, (Lévi-Strauss)
etc
• 1950s-1980s
• Ethnographic focus
• “primitive” religions
• local forms of “world religions” (1950s)
• Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism
• Religious movements in the “Third World”
• The context of culture contact
• Millenarian movements
• Revitalization movements
• Eg. Ghost Dance, Peyote cult, cargo cults
 Participant Observation—a frequently used
Anthropological Method
• What:
• It requires living with the community being studied,
learning its language
• and participating in its life without seeking to alter it.
• As a participant, the scholar simply observes and tries
to get as close as possible to seeing a religion from the
‘inside’
• Thick Description:
• Describing multi-dimensionally and multi-contextually
what a person is doing
• And what the person thinks s/he is doing
 Phenomenological Approach
• Aim—Structure of Religiosity
• Overall Task—imaginatively entering into
the world of the religious person
• Understand as the religious person does
• See the world thru eyes of the religious person
• Make the subject of study speak with its own
authentic voice
• Accurate description of what is seen and heard
 Steps
1. Distancing fr researcher’s own position
2. Bracketing—attitudes, value judgments,
presuppositions
3. Crossing the cultural distance (as
researcher becomes the participant)
4. Empathy
5. Sympathetic imagination
6. Seeing the essentials in the materials and
any situation being studied
7. Essence of a religious phenomenon is
realised and understood in its
manifestations
 An example—my previous research
in Charismatic Christianity
• The structure of charismatic experience
• Separation – Liminality – reaggregation
• Liminality and Sacrality