We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2013
We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the imperative is not a methodological recommendation at all, but an ethical–political one. To take religion “seriously” is to grant it its rightful place as an independent variable amidst others, without reducing it to the old categories of politics or class or gender. It is implicitly frivolous to see religion as a superstructural manifestation of a deeper social or economic reality, as have many functionalist theories from Marx onwards. These accounts are routinely pilloried as condescending towards the past, and as failing to take historical actors at their word when they claim to act for religious reasons. There is much to this; nonetheless, the currently reigning assumption of religious autonomy, like that of other cultural artifacts, has been perilously undertheorized. In this joint review, I would like to show how this understanding of religion impedes historical understanding. It might be the case that, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, religion is too important to take seriously.
1 Pritchard, Elizabeth, “Seriously, What Does ‘Taking Religion Seriously’ Mean?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010), 1087–1111CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Sewell, William H. Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 2.
3 For an account of American intellectuals’ embrace of Tocqueville see Mancini, Matthew, Alexis de Tocqueville and American Intellectuals: From His Time to Ours (Oxford, 2006)Google Scholar. For Tocqueville as “anti-Marx” see Sheryl Gordon, “In the Shade of Tocqueville,” PhD diss., 2011, Department of History, City University of New York, iv. For some recent contributions to a burgeoning literature on American civil religion in the Cold War see Schultz, Kevin, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; and Stevens, Jason W., God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America's Cold War (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar.
4 David Smilde and Matthew May, “The Emerging Strong Program in the Sociology of Religion,” SSRC Working Paper, New York, Feb. 2010, available online at “The Immanent Frame.”
5 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New York, 2004), 32Google Scholar.
6 Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” available at http://religion.ua.edu/thesesonmethod.html, accessed July 2012.
7 Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2002), 194Google Scholar.
8 Perreau-Saussine, Emile, Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought, trans. Rex, Richard (Princeton, 2012), 127Google Scholar.
9 Ibid., 91.
10 Ibid., 74.
11 Ibid., 144.
12 Ibid., 12.
13 Ibid., 90.
14 Ibid., 4.
15 Ibid., 1.
16 Howard, Thomas Albert, God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide (New York, 2011), 10–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Ibid., 113, 137, 199.
18 Ibid., 197, emphasis in original.
19 Ibid., 7.
20 Ibid., 137.
21 Ibid., 11.
22 Ibid., 10.
23 Kloppenberg, James, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America,” Reviews in American History 29 (2001), 460–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Rogers M., “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87 (1993), 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Perreau-Saussine, Catholicism and Democracy, 137.
25 Howard, God and the Atlantic, 202, 134, 202; Gordon, Sarah Barringer, The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (Cambridge, MA, 2010)Google Scholar.
26 Sewell, Logics of History, chap. 1.
27 Foster, Gaines M., Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)Google Scholar; Herzog, Jonathan, The Spiritual–Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold War (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Hollinger, David, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (Princeton, 1996)Google Scholar; Hollinger, , “Religious Ideas: Should They Be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?” Representations 101 (2008), 144–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sehat, David, The Myth of Religious Freedom (New York, 2011)Google Scholar; Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997)Google Scholar; Stevens, God-Fearing and Free.
28 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000), 77Google Scholar.
