Defining “religion”

The critical analyst of religion and religious studies, Jonathan Z. Smith, has insisted that one of the basic rules of teaching an introductory religious studies course is, “always begin with the question of definition, and return to it" (in Lehrich 2013, 3). He has also said,

there is no more pathetic spectacle in all of academia than the endless citation of the little list of 50 odd definitions of religion from Janies Leu-ba’s Psychology of Religion in introductory textbooks as proof that religion is beyond definition, that it is fundamentally a mysterium. Nonsense! We created it and ... we must take responsibility for it.

(In Lehrich, 80, originally in Soundings 61, no. 1 (1988): 231-244)

Smith’s point, frequently cited by subsequent scholars,⁵ is that “religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. ... Religion has no independent existence apart from the Academy” (1982, xi). However, this must be considered very carefully. The classification “religion” may be a creation of the scholar’s study. The class or category referenced by the word "religion,” may have no independent existence apart from the academy, but the objects and behaviors in the world subsumed by the category are real, and classifying them as "religious” does not necessitate any specific assumptions concerning their significance. While Smith rightly insisted that “‘religion’ is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars” (1982, xi) when he repeated that claim 16 years later, he went on to say that it “plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as ‘language’ plays in linguistics or ‘culture’ plays in anthropology" (1998, 269). Language and culture as categories or taxons are constituted as they are, as classes, by scholarly activity. The classes nonetheless contain real objects and real behaviors, and so does “religion”—without assuming any necessary truth-value to claims made within the class. That is, accepting that “religion” refers to a specific class of real objects and behaviors, which includes, say, the Buddhist claim that Siddhartha belongs to a class of fully enlightened beings, or the Christian claim that Jesus is God Incarnate, in no way necessitates any specific assumptions concerning the nature of those specific claims.

That said; let us remain mindful that attempts to define religion are attempts to define the symbol, “religion.” As Smith indicates, Leuba’s Psychology of Religion, suggests some 50 definitions of religion, none of which were without significant problems. Definitions did not cease to appear after that date but proliferated, with no greater success. By 1962 another Smith, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, proposed that finally, perhaps,

the sustained inability to clarify what the word “religion" signifies, in itself suggests that the term ought to be dropped; that it is a distorted concept not really corresponding to anything definite or distinctive in the objective world. The phenomena we call religious undoubtedly exist. Yet perhaps the notion that they constitute in themselves some distinctive entity is an unwarranted analysis.

(17)

Nonetheless, Smith (W.C.) goes on to say that this is too extreme a conclusion, and

an alternative suggestion could be that a failure to agree on definitions of religion may well stem from the quality of the material. For what a man thinks about religion is central to what he thinks about life and the universe as a whole. The meaning that one ascribes to the term is a key to the meaning that one finds in existence.

(18)

This may be one of the reasons that, as John Lyden points out, “we have a tendency to limit what we view as religion to that which is recognized as such by us in our own culture” (Lyden 2003, 2). However,

one cannot generalize about religion on the basis of the language and norms of just a single case, just as geologists do not construct a geology on the basis of the rocks that merely happen to be in one’s neighborhood. The neighborhood rocks, analogues to one’s own local religion, are themselves instances of certain common, universal properties.

(William Paden 2005, 208)

Despite his misgivings in 1962, Wilfred Cantwell Smith did not drop the term, “religion.” His penultimate monograph, Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (1981) used the term it in its title. However, scholars were now alerted to the problematic nature of the definition of religion, and it was arguably in response to this that Ninian Smart began the attempt to resolve the difficulties of definitions of religion that were “minimalist” (excluding too many traditions that scholars recognized as religions) or “maximalist” (admitting too much that was not) by identifying the religious by its component “dimensions." Smart was a student of philosophy under J. L. Austin at Queen’s College, Oxford, and author of over 23 books on religion. He first published a significant book on religion, Reasons and Faiths, in 1958 and was president of the American Academy of Religion in 2000, and his analysis is significant. He first attempted to delineate religion in six dimensions; those of Ritual, Mythology, Doctrine, Ethics, Society, and Experience (1969, 15—25). In The World’s Religions in 1989 Smart introduced a seventh "material” dimension and used the term “artistic” as synonymous with “material” (1989, 25). In Dimensions of the Sacred (1996) Smart continued his elaboration and added another two dimensions, the political and the economic (10). So he added three to his original six, whose titles he expanded to the Practical and Ritual, the Experiential and Emotional, the Narrative or Mythic, the Doctrinal and Philosophical, the Ethical and Legal, and the Social and Institutional (1989, 12—21). The expansion of the experiential dimension into the experiential and emotional dimension raises an important point. Experience would normally be seen as a datum. An experience of an object or event—call it x—is either experienced or it is not. An emotion is different. It is the emotion itself that one experiences. The emotion may be in response to x, certainly. However, the emotion is not simply of x. The perception is a sensory experience of an objective presence. The response is an internally determined reaction to the perception. One may infer that for Smart the experiential dimension is the combination of sensory perception and emotional response. Certainly, in his description of the experiential and emotional dimension in The World’s Religions, Smart describes what would be considered responses rather than perceptions: “awe,” "fear,” and “feelings aroused by" certain experiences (1989, 13). The "invisible world” to which these dimensions all clearly referred in the earliest work, however, had become severely attenuated in the latter.⁷

Dutton's “cluster concept" and Smart’s "dimensional model" avoid some of the difficulties of attempting to state a shorter and more concise intensional definition; however, they also avoid the full elaboration of their own theoretical implications. Dutton does not tell us how his 12 cluster criteria arise or are related. In Smart’s case, there is a lack of definition of "the invisible world” to which the religious dimensions refer (and once again here is the as-yet-unexplained implication that material products and manifest behavior induce some kind of "perception of the imperceptible”). In a more recent attempt to return to a concise and categorical, intensional, definition of religion Kevin Schilbrack has suggested that religion is constituted by “normative practices that at least implicitly make ontological claims in terms of which the practical norms are authorized” (2014, 129) and by “practices, beliefs, and institutions that recommend normative paths based on superempirical realities" (135). He goes on to claim that these practices “put people in touch with reality” (151) and later calls religion “forms of life predicated upon the reality of the supernatural," since religious communities “hold that they are in touch with something real" (171). This shares something in common with Smart’s dimensional model in that ontological claims about superempirical or supernatural realities (what Smart calls the mythical, experiential, and doctrinal dimensions) are connected to practices and behaviors deemed to be normative (Smart’s ritual, ethical, and social dimensions). None of this requires that religious truth be synonymous with historical accuracy (“make overt assertions of fact"), because claims to ontology can still be used to warrant normative practices, even if those claims prove physically inaccurate.

We can share these glimpses of the behemoth in the mist, but as one characteristic comes to light it casts a new shadow, threatening to obscure further insight. Art may be a case of making special, but what are the specific characteristics of such specialness? Are they physically instantiated in the special item in some way? Or only in the response to it? Ritual may be felt to give access to an invisible world, or to superempirical realities, but how? What does this mean? The demonstration of skill may be deeply moving and pleasurable, but why, when the employment of that skill has no practical value? Can these and the host of related questions be answered?