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Title
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The Sociology of Religious Experience
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Author
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Porpora, Douglas
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Research Area
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Social Institutions
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Topic
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Religious Institutions
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Abstract
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This essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism. This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up.
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Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin N. Laland and Michael O'Brien
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Identifier
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etrds0352
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extracted text
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The Sociology of Religious
Experience
DOUGLAS PORPORA
Abstract
This essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context
of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle
of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly
excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other
disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological
atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism.
This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up.
INTRODUCTION
The most basic question we can ask about religion is the one sociologists do
not normally ask. Why are people religious? Or why are some people religious and not others?
When we ask this question, religious experience assumes central place.
Perhaps, one important reason why some people are religious and others
are not is because in contrast with the nonreligious, many religious people
experience or at least believe they experience religious realities. Experiencing
those realities or believing they do, such religious people believe in those
realities and, hence, are religious.
An answer along the above lines was first given by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1996) in 1799 when he released his tome, On Religion: Speeches to Its
Cultured Despisers. Religion’s cultured despisers included Schleiermacher’s
own sophisticated friends, strong advocates of Enlightenment reason.
According to them, religious beliefs were just silly superstitions. Schleiermacher’s religious despisers were thus the eighteenth century’s version of
Christopher Hitchens (2009) and Richard Dawkins (2008). In response to
religion’s cultured despisers, Schleiermacher argued that religious belief
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
originates in religious experience and thus from contact with a perceived
reality that the nonreligious either do not similarly perceive or which,
perceiving, they interpret differently.
Since Schleiermacher, religious experience has been the object of intense
study by those who address themselves to the central question about religion.
Religious experience has been well studied by philosophy, religious studies,
and psychology. In contrast, religious experience is not frequently studied
by contemporary sociologists. Why not? It might be conceptual difficulties
with the very notion of religious experience (see Yamane, 1998), although
that difficulty has not stopped other disciplines from studying it, and sociologists study all sorts of things that are conceptually problematic. Just ask
most sociologists what is meant by human agency or social structure. Alternately, it may be that qua experience, religious experience is considered more
the province of psychology (Yamane, 1998). Again, however, it would seem
that we are well past the pure sociology of Emile Durkheim’s (1982) admonishment to eschew any attention to individuals.
Perhaps, a major reason why the study of religious experience is avoided is
because its study threatens naturalism and the demarcation line supposedly
distinguishing science from nonscience. Naturalism is the view in the philosophy of science that natural, this-worldly forces and agencies are the only
causes operative in the world—or at least the only ones that can be studied
scientifically. Thus, to go beyond natural forces and agencies is to go beyond
science.
To keep the sociology of religion on the science side of the demarcation
line, Peter Berger (1967, p. 100) famously introduced a rule he called methodological atheism. It is a rule that the sociology of religion still largely follows
today. In conformity with naturalism, methodological atheism enjoins sociologists to avoid supernatural explanations of religious phenomena. It is not
that supernatural agencies are denied. But it is denied that they can be studied in a scientific manner. Thus, in order to remain scientific, sociologists of
religion are to avoid supernatural explanations and confine themselves to the
social causes of religious behavior.
For most of what is studied by the sociology of religion, methodological
atheism works quite well. There is no need, for example, to invoke supernatural agencies to explain why religiosity persists more in the United States
than in Western Europe. For such questions, social forces and agencies quite
suffice.
It is otherwise, however, when it comes to religious experience. In the case
of religious experience, we centrally confront a putative, nonnatural explanation of the phenomenon under study. Simply to set that explanation aside
in favor of an exclusively social explanation is hardly value-neutral. Rather,
in this case, methodological atheism is value-laden in favor of naturalism.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
3
A more truly neutral posture would be methodological agnosticism, which
would have us remain open-minded about supernatural realities (see Porpora, 2006). Of course, that very open-mindedness breaks from unquestioned
naturalism and thus challenges what it means to be scientific. Navigating that
challenge is itself a challenge. Nevertheless, methodological agnosticism is a
direction in which scientific discussion of religious experience seems to be
moving. This essay will end with the issues raised by this new direction and
with the potential lines of research it suggests.
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE?
What is religious experience? It is the experience of religious realities. This
preliminary formulation is meant to be less circular than it sounds. It is
meant to highlight the need to raise a prior question: What do we mean by
experience?
According to the most relevant dictionary definition, to experience is to
observe, encounter, or undergo something. Experience is thus different from
just a passing thought or belief. When we think something or believe something, we are not encountering or undergoing anything. While thoughts are
also certainly involved in experience, what the word experience distinctly
implies is an impact on us—on our thoughts and feelings in particular— of
something outside of or apart from us.
When we are analyzing experience then, there are three categories we must
consider: the subject of experience, the object of experience, and the content
of experience. The subject of experience is the person undergoing the experience. The object of experience is what that person is experiencing; what,
in other words, is having a perceptual impact on that person. The content
of experience is the nature of that impact: what is perceived and how it is
interpreted and felt. Therefore, the study of experience must encompass both
cognitions and emotions. Further, in any genuine experience, some object of
experience contributes something to the content of experience.
If normally an object of experience contributes something to the content
of experience, then experience is a way of knowing, a way of making contact
with an ontologically independent reality. It is this noetic quality that troubles
sociology when it comes to religious experience. Yet, it is with this issue that
this essay is starting to wrestle.
Having clarified what is entailed by the very category of experience,
religious experience can be defined fairly straightforwardly. Religious experience refers to an impact on us of a reality that the experiencing subject considers religious or spiritual. Thus, in short, religious experiences are putative
experiences of religious or spiritual realities. Consistently, in public opinion
polls, between a third and a half of the U.S. public reports some religious
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience. In a 2006 survey, for example, 54% of respondents who said they
believed in God also reported having personally experienced the presence
of God (Faith Matters Survey, 2006). Sometimes, other transcendental experiences are polled, as in a study by sociologist Andrew Greeley (1975), which
asked subjects whether they have ever felt they were close to a powerful,
spiritual force that lifted them out of themselves, an experience that Greeley
considered ecstasy. Over a third of respondents answered affirmatively.
THE RANGE AND FURTHER STUDY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Certainly, all three of sociology’s major founders—Emile Durkhheim, Karl
Marx, and Max Weber—addressed religion. Without perhaps calling explicit
attention to it as such, religious experience played particularly central roles
for Durkheim and Weber. For Durkheim (2008), the experience of God was
actually the experience of communitas (the local and perhaps even cosmic
community), especially in what anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1960)
and Victor Turner (2008) later called the liminal states associated with ritual
or festival.
Likewise, although now largely overlooked, religious experience figures
prominently in two of Weber’s key concepts. What after all is a calling
(Weber, 1958)? A calling is not primordially a belief, but a belief about an
experience—the sense or feeling of being summoned by something or someone outside oneself. Charisma too did not originally mean as today—simply
the charm or magnetic presence we might associate with a celebrity. For
Weber (1947), charisma was a quality within a person that others regard as
cosmic or spiritual, a quality that Rudolph Otto (1958) would go on to call
numinous. To the extent that this quality is something others feel, or at least
think they do, charisma is a matter of religious experience.
For the most part, however, for sociology, the study of religious experience
has been “the road not taken” (Yamane, 1998). Thus, religious experience has
been studied mostly by those outside of sociology. As noted, Schleiermacher
was the first to call academic attention to religious experience, focusing
particularly on what he called the feeling of absolute dependence. In part,
this feeling might be interpreted as a sense of our own contingency and even
the contingency of the entire universe, the sense of some need for ultimate
grounding. In part, too, the feeling suggests a connection to a source of
ontological sustenance. Thus, much later but in an equally seminal work,
Mircea Eliade (1987) examined how in attitudes of prayer or in sacred times
and sacred places, the religious person, what Eliade called homo religious,
taps into a felt source of greater being and greater meaning, the two virtually
coinciding.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
5
Otto’s (1958) The Idea of the Holy was equally seminal. There, among other
things, Otto introduced the notion of the numinous, that which is experienced
as wholly other, that is, beyond our ordinary, natural ken. It is what we would
experience were we to encounter a ghost or an extraterrestrial intelligence,
that is, a combination perhaps of a distinctive kind of dread, awe, and fascination. What is numinous is related to the uncanny. It is this numinous
quality that is built both into charisma as originally understood and into the
idea of God as found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Perhaps, the most well known among social scientists is William James.
With a father who was a Swedenborgian, William James was not only an
early president of the American Psychological Association but also a founder
of the still extant American Society for Psychic Research. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1961) canvassed many of the different forms taken
by religious experience. Although many of these forms were quite dramatic
and unusual, some were quite ordinary. Among the latter was what James
(1961, p. 62) called a primordial experience of something there: “It is as if
there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call ’something there,’ more deep and
more general than any of the special and particular ’senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.” Later,
in his controversial book, Honest to God, Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson
(1963) would call this feeling of something there an apprehension of a depth
dimension to reality.
One other very important figure in the study of religious experience was
biologist Alister Hardy. A professor of marine biology at Oxford University,
after his retirement, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre. Housed now at the Lampeter branch of the University of Wales, the center
has accumulated thousands of accounts of people’s religious experience and
sponsors further research on the subject. Interested scholars are invited to
peruse these archives, but one must physically visit Lampeter to do so.
STANDARD SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION
Currently, there are two major sociological approaches to the study of religion: rational choice theory and social constructionism. Neither affords much
place to religious experience.
Rational choice theory, the less dominant of the two approaches, seeks to
represent religious behavior as a rational choice. The problem with rational
choice theory is that the only form of rationality recognized is instrumental
reason, what Weber (1947) termed Zweck Rationalität. Rational choice theory
essentially argues that it is rational for people to pray to or otherwise propitiate their gods insofar as people expect to receive something in return from
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
their gods. If the putative gods exist, it may well be instrumentally rational
to pray to or otherwise propitiate them, but is it rational in the first place
to believe in their existence? This question concerns not instrumental but
epistemic rationality, a matter that appears beyond the ken of rational choice
theory, as if it too, like religious realities, were wholly other.
The question of epistemic rationality is actually also evaded by social
constructionism, the second and more dominant sociological approach to
religion. As a theoretical paradigm, social constructionism was initiated
in 1967 by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) classic The Social
Construction of Reality. Berger subsequently applied social constructionism
specifically to religion in The Sacred Canopy.
It was in The Sacred Canopy that Berger (1967, p. 100) introduced the principle of methodological atheism. Religious himself, Berger’s intent was not to
promote actual atheism. It was quite the opposite. In part, Berger was trying
only to separate science from nonscience. In part, by doing so, Berger was
seeking to secure religion from scientific reductionism.
Since the work of Berger and Luckmann, social constructionism has become
a common default stance among sociologists and not just in application to
religion. By the end of the last century, particularly with the rise of feminism
and other social identity movements, social theorists were declaring everything a social construction. Gender was socially constructed and race, then
even science and, finally, all reality.
There was of course an element of truth to all these claims, and in some
cases such as gender and race, much more than an element. Race, in particular, appears to be nothing but a social construction. In many cases, however,
including religion, it is the “nothing but” suggestion that is the sticking point
with social constructionism.
What does it even mean for something to be socially constructed? Social
constructionism holds—quite reasonably—that we have no uninterpreted
access to reality. Instead, we always grasp reality via one or another interpretation. Such interpretations, furthermore, are always socially and culturally
shaped. Thus, it is the job of the sociologist to describe just how our interpretations of things are socially and culturally shaped.
What about objective reality, reality as it is in itself, apart from any human
interpretation? Along with social and cultural shaping, does not objective
reality contribute something to our interpretations of reality? This question
has tended to strike sociologists—including Berger and Luckmann—as
philosophical, a matter of epistemology beyond the scope of sociology. The
question thus has tended to be bracketed out of sociological discussion.
Instead, sociologists have understood their mandate to be the examination
solely of the social and cultural influences on reality construction. For sociologists, the question of ultimate or objective reality has thereby been evaded.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
7
Of course, in all social constructionist works, the evasion of the ontological question is more apparent than real. There is a difference between what
people consider reality and what reality actually is, that is, the distinction
originally made by philosopher Emmanuel Kant between phenomenal and
noumenal reality. As for Kant, the default stance of social constructionism is
that the twain never meet.
So it has been from the beginning with the social constructionist approach
to religion. From the scientific, sociological point of view, Berger (1967, p. 100)
argued that religion is just a phenomenal projection of purely human ideas
onto the otherwise blank screen of the noumenal world. Any putative contribution to human religion from the other side—from, that is, noumenal or
objective reality–was beyond scientific inquiry. Thus, in the end, The Sacred
Canopy mirrored proto-Marxist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1989) The
Essence of Christianity, rendering religion nothing but a human projection
onto the world. Such was the logical result of methodological atheism.
FROM METHODOLOGICAL ATHEISM
TO METHODOLOGICAL AGNOSTICISM
Much later, Berger would become very critical of the direction taken by much
of what came to be argued by social constructionists. Yet, even before, Berger
seemingly became disenchanted even with his own methodological atheism.
After all, whereas Berger had started out protesting the conceptual liquidation of religious reality by sociology, his own methodological rule seemed to
produce that very effect. Thus, in books such as A Rumor of Angels (Berger,
1970) and The Heretical Imperative (Berger, 1979), addressed more to theologians than to sociologists, Berger seemed to suggest that religious experience
offers a nonscientific way of knowing that does in fact put people in touch
with objective religious reality. In religious experience, Berger (1979, p. 59)
argued, “there are indicators of a reality that is truly ‘other’ and that the religious imagination of man ultimately reflects.”
Here, Berger’s admission seems entirely to vitiate the principle of methodological atheism. If theologians and subjects of religious experience can
access objective, noumenal religious reality, why cannot sociologists?
Perhaps, it may be argued, because unlike theology and the subjects of
religious experience, a truly scientific sociology must maintain a stance of
value-neutrality. Leave aside for the moment that the positivist (and Weberian) ideal of value-neutrality in science has by now been completely discredited. Suffice it to say that, as noted, the principle of methodological atheism
is not itself value-neutral; it is instead an a priori endorsement of naturalism.
Not only value-laden, social constructionism’s programmatic exclusion of
objective reality is philosophically untenable. In the first place, such exclusion
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
obliterates the very category of experience. Recall that in any genuine experience, the object of experience (noumenal reality) contributes something to
the content of experience. Thus, insofar as social constructionism would have
us ignore any contribution to the content of experience from the noumenal
object of experience, it excludes from consideration all genuine experience.
The implications are injurious even to sociology’s scientific pretentions. If
the world’s contribution to knowledge is always to be bracketed out from the
start, then the constructedness of reality is effectively removed from empirical contestation and surreptitiously fixed instead as an unfalsifiable, disciplinary premise.
It gets worse. It is assumed that the social and extra-social parts of religion
are easily partitioned, permitting an a priori focus on the one and a bracketing
of the other. Yet, if there are no uninterpreted experiences, if all reality comes
to us already saturated with interpretation, then the extra-socially real and
the socially interpreted cannot so easily be prized apart. They confront us
rather as a mangle.
If the extra-socially real and the socially interpreted comprise a mangle,
then we cannot know in advance which is which. Instead, the two can only
be separated empirically case by case. Thus, unless the extra-social is admitted to empirical examination as well, the result will be to treat all as socially
constructed—including what is not. Then, despite what sociology may think,
it will not have shown anything to be socially constructed because its investigation will have failed to rule out what is extra-social.
The upshot is that in the case of religious experience specifically, sociology cannot avoid investigating any putatively extra-social contribution. The
extra-social cannot legitimately be banished by a transcendental a priori. It
must, rather, be approached empirically. Methodological atheism then must
be abandoned in favor of what may be called methodological agnosticism.
Whereas methodological atheism excludes the possibility that the objects of
religious experience are real, methodological agnosticism makes no such a
priori judgment. Instead, any such judgment is always the result of empirical
investigation.
CAN IT BE DONE?
When it comes to religious experience, can methodological agnosticism
really be practiced? Methodological agnosticism not only can be practiced, it
has been and is increasingly being practiced. Actually, the open-mindedness
of methodological agnosticism was the stance all along of William James,
who appreciated how the specifically passive and noetic qualities of religious experience pointed to an independent object of experience. In other
The Sociology of Religious Experience
9
words, James’s presumption was that people with religious experience were
genuinely experiencing something real; the question was what.
Subsequent work in psychology has continued in the Jamesian tradition.
Most notable is a large compendium of work on anomalous experience
published by the American Psychological Association. Called Varieties of
Anomalous Experience, the Jamesian connection is clear (Cardena, Lynn, &
Krippner, 2004). The handbook encompasses research on such phenomena as
near-death, psi-related, hallucinatory, past-life, and out-of-body experiences.
The work canvassed by the handbook is remarkable in a number of
respects. Remarkable in the first place is just the consideration given to
the category of experience. Equally remarkable for a publication of the
American Psychological Association is how interdisciplinary the work is.
Represented along with psychology is psychiatry, medicine, physiology,
parapsychology, history, anthropology, and even a sociologist or two.
The refreshing intent seems to be not to affirm a discipline but to answer
questions. Most remarkable of all, however, is the consideration given by
various pieces to allegedly paranormal phenomena. The paranormal is not
ruled out from the start as would be required by a naturalist presupposition.
Instead, the evidence is followed wherever it seems to lead.
Some of the most interesting of the current psychological works on
religious experience come from neuroscience. Using neuroimaging, for
example, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili (2001) have shown
that intense prayer and meditation affect the experiential centers of the
brain. Empirically demonstrated thereby is that we are dealing not simply
with belief but also with experience. Again, of course, the actual object of
experience remains a matter of debate.
Equally open at the moment to fascinating debate is the object or cause of
so-called near-death experiences (NDEs), experiences many people report
after cardiac resuscitation and even after apparent cessation of brain activity
of various encounters with tunnels, a welcoming, embracing light, and
deceased relatives. Physiological processes seemingly cannot be the full
explanation as sociologists such as Allan Kellehear (1996) demonstrated
that what is experienced varies culturally. The very same evidence, however, suggests that the experience is not completely a social construction,
for it seems to be found across cultures. Overall, the study of NDEs is a
burgeoning field, to which sociologists can and should contribute more.
TOWARD A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR SOCIOLOGY
ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The foregoing considerations all point to the possibility of a new
research agenda for sociology around an alternative theory of religious
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience—and of religion generally. For want of a better name, call the
theory the transcendental signal theory (TST). TST hypothesizes a transcendental or depth dimension to reality that can variously make itself felt in
human experience. The theory further hypothesizes that it is experiential
connection with such reality that explains why many people are religious.
That is not to say that all people are religious exclusively or even at all for
this reason. Doubtlessly, many practice religion out of fear, out of hope for
an afterlife, in search of community, or from simple inertia. It is possible,
however, even for many of these people that part of what makes them
religious is an experiential connection with some transcendental reality.
Of course, because there are no observations without interpretation, the
hypothesized transcendental signal always comes through embedded in
one or another cultural tradition, which, from a cosmic point of view, might
be considered noise.
TST seems to be the direction that Berger himself was moving in his
extra-sociological writings. It is a theory that makes sense of the historical
trajectory of liberal, mainline Protestantism, the scholarly attempt of which
has always been to better separate noise from signal and to be better open to
the possible diversity of signals out there to be received.
TST can likewise help us avoid what is called the “derogation of the lay
actor” (Giddens, 1993), the tendency to advance theories that insufficiently
credit the intelligence of lay actors. According to TST, there is something or
some things transcendentally real to which even the holders of otherwise
untenable religious beliefs are responding. The trouble is, according to the
theory, that insofar as the message received embodies both universal, transcendental signal and local, culturally interpreted human noise, the tendency
is for people to absolutize the entire message. Although, for example, some
divine reality may shine through the Bible, the Koran, or the Talmud, fundamentalist believers in these sacred books, correctly detecting in them, according to the theory, some real transcendental signal, nevertheless incorrectly
canonize the whole as if it were signal in its entirety. Because, however, TST
assumes something real and valuable to which even fundamentalist believers are responding, it does not go so far as to denigrate their cognitions as
complete illusion.
Yet one more novel feature of TST is its refusal to privilege the religious
inexperience of atheists. If it makes sense to research the extent to which
experiences deemed religious are socially constructed, it makes equal sense
to research how atheists socially construct nonreligious interpretations of the
same or kindred experiences. Herein lies a course of sociological research that
seems to have been rarely, if ever, touched.
All well and good, it might be said, but TST nonetheless is audacious in its
departure from naturalism and methodological atheism. Can such a theory
The Sociology of Religious Experience
11
even be empirically tested? In answer, as we have already observed, if TST
cannot be empirically tested then neither can social constructionism nor,
indeed, any other encompassing sociological theory of religion. The reason
is that TST must at least be refuted as an alternate hypothesis in order to
vindicate any of the other sociological theories. And if TST is to be refuted,
it must first be fairly entertained. Thus, whether it proves right or wrong,
TST needs to be considered by sociology. Doing so, returns sociology to the
biggest of questions: Why are people religious?
To be sure, there are important empirical and conceptual questions to be
asked of TST. Those questions are currently being asked, although with the
exception of a few such as Margaret Poloma and Matthew Lee, the questioners are mostly outside of sociology. Consider Ann Taves, for example, in
religious studies. Her (2009) Religious Experience Reconsidered collects most of
the questions researchers across disciplines are currently asking about something like TST (see also Poloma and Hood 2008).
As multiple disciplines are pursuing this research agenda, different
questions come from different disciplines. An important question from the
humanities, for example, reflects the turn there to language and discourse.
As David Yamane (2000) in sociology has also asked, can we researchers
access religious experience directly or is it rather only subjects’ discourse
about religious experience that we actually study? It is an important question, although the stark either/or contrast seems overdrawn. It is like asking
whether we can ever study quarks directly or just discourse about quarks.
Although radical constructionists might favor the latter view, it is then not
just religious reality that fades away.
A similarly large and much contested question is whether there are at least
some experiences that are irreducibly or sui generis religious or whether all
experiences must rather await subjects’ ascription to them of religious or
nonreligious character. Schleiermacher, Otto, and Eliade all tended toward
the former view whereas James and, more recently, Wayne Proudfood (1987)
tend toward the latter. With push back from philosophers such as Robert
Forman (2008), this debate is currently at a standoff. Sociologists might contribute their own insights.
The work being done is not just conceptual. A number of multidisciplinary
ethnographies, some including sociologists Margaret Poloma and Matthew
Lee, have been studying new paradigm or emerging church, an evangelical
but nonfundamentalist Christianity that emphasizes divine love and a direct
experience of God (Poloma and Hood 2008; Lee and Poloma 2012). In When
God Talks Back, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2012) sets out to learn how
it is that God comes to be experienced as real for people in this movement.
Luhrmann’s findings are fascinating. Admittedly, she begins from the perspective of methodological atheism, claiming only to study the human side
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of things and denying any ability to comment on objective reality itself. Her
analysis, however, moves beyond this position, framing what practitioners
do less as construction than as learning new perceptual skills and forms of
attention, a frame leaving open the possibility that some objective reality is
actually being detected and not simply projected. In the end, Luhrmann confesses to having learned herself to experience an element of what might be
considered transcendent reality.
Three other books looking with a different emphasis at this movement are
The Science and Theology of Godly Love, edited by Mathew T. Lee and Amos
Young (2012), Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church, written by Margaret Poloma and psychologist of religion Ralph W. Hood (2008),
and The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the
Experience of God’s Love (Lee and Poloma 2012). All three works are part of
a 3-year project funded by the Templeton Foundation to research the experience and expression of Godly Love in the Pentecostal tradition. They examine
specifically how God’s love is experienced and in response practiced. The
first volume expressly advertises itself as rooted in methodological agnosticism, and the Poloma and Hood team likewise describe their research as so
guided. What distinguishes this work, particularly that of Poloma and Hood,
is its extensive examination of the causal effects of a particular kind of religious experience on social movement formation. This direction could mark a
new research agenda for sociology, one that connects with Christian Smith’s
(1996) Resisting Reagan, which similarly examined the religious roots of the
Central America Solidarity movement in the 1980s.
As can be seen, scholars in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and religion are all currently pursuing research that, if it does not quite go by the
name of TST, at least seems to move away from the stance of methodological atheism and more in the direction of methodological agnosticism. Doing
so raises questions that sociologists have heretofore tended to ignore but to
which their own expertise could ably contribute. Perhaps in doing so the
whole sociology of religion might be invigorated.
REFERENCES
Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. New
York, NY: Doubleday.
Berger, P. (1970). A rumor of angels: Modern society and the rediscovery of the supernatural.
New York, NY: Doubleday.
Berger, P. (1979). The heretical imperative: Contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. New York, NY:
Anchor.
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Cardena, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.) (2004). The varieties of anomalous
experience. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Dawkins, R. (2008). The God delusion. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of the sociological method. New York, NY: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (2008). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Eliade, M. (1987). The sacred and the profane. The nature of religion. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich: San Diego, CA.
Faith Matters Survey (2006). Retrieved Dec-8-2012 from the iPOLL Databank,
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut.
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.ezproxy2.library.drexel.edu/data_access/
ipoll/ipoll.html.
Feuerbach, L. (1989). The essence of Christianity. New York, NY: Prometheus Books.
Forman, R. K. (2008). Neuroscience, consciousness and spirituality conference, July
2–4, 2008 Freiburg, Germany. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(8), 110–115.
Giddens, A. (1993). The new rules of the sociological method. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Greeley, A. (1975). Ecstasy: A way of knowing. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.
Hitchens, C. (2009). God is not great. How religion spoils everything. East Providence,
RI: Twelve.
James, W. (1961). The varieties of religious experience. New York, NY: CollierMacMillan.
Kellehear, A. (1996). Experiences near death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Poloma, M. (2012). The heart of religion: Spiritual empowerment, benevolence, and the experience of God’s love. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Yong, A. (Eds.) (2012). The science and theology of Godly love. deKalb, IL:
NIU Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical
relationship with God. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Newberg, A., & D’Aquili, E. (2001). Why God won’t go away. New York, NY: Ballantine.
Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. Oxford: New York, NY.
Poloma, M. M., & Hood, R. W., Jr., (2008). Blood and fire: Godly love in a Pentecostal
emerging church. New York: New York University Press.
Porpora, D. V. (2006). Methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism, and religious experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 57–75.
Proudfood, W. (1987). Religious experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robinson, J. A. T. (1963). Honest to God. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.
Schleiermacher, F. (1996). On religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Smith, C. (1996). Resisting Reagan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study
of religion and other special things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Turner, V. (2008). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New Brunswick,
Canada: Aldine Transaction Press.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization. New York, NY: The
Free Press.
Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York, NY: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
Yamane, D. (1998). Religious experience. In W. Jr. Swatos (Ed.), The encyclopedia of
religion and society (pp. 179–182). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Yamane, D. (2000). Narrative and religious experience. Sociology of Religion, 61,
171–189.
FURTHER READING
Alston, W. (1991). Perceiving God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bender, C. (2010). The new metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American religious
imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Neitz, M., & Spickard, J. (1989). Steps toward a sociology of religious experience: The
theories of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and Alfred Schutz. Sociological Analysis, 50(2),
15–34.
Porpora, D. V. (2001). Landscapes of the soul: The Loss of moral meaning in American life.
Oxford: New York, NY.
Yamane, D., & Polzer, M. (1994). Ways of seeing ecstasy in modern society:
Experiential-expressive and cultural-linguistic Views. Sociological Analysis, 55,
1–25.
DOUGLAS PORPORA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Porpora is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture
and Communication at Drexel University. He is an active member of NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby for Women Religious.
He writes mainly on social theory, but his books with similar theme include
Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (2001,
Oxford University Press), Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2004,
Routledge), and most recently, Post-Ethical Society: The Attack on Iraq, Abu
Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular (2014 University of Chicago
Press).
RELATED ESSAYS
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
The Sociology of Religious Experience
15
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
-
The Sociology of Religious
Experience
DOUGLAS PORPORA
Abstract
This essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context
of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle
of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly
excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other
disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological
atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism.
This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up.
INTRODUCTION
The most basic question we can ask about religion is the one sociologists do
not normally ask. Why are people religious? Or why are some people religious and not others?
When we ask this question, religious experience assumes central place.
Perhaps, one important reason why some people are religious and others
are not is because in contrast with the nonreligious, many religious people
experience or at least believe they experience religious realities. Experiencing
those realities or believing they do, such religious people believe in those
realities and, hence, are religious.
An answer along the above lines was first given by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1996) in 1799 when he released his tome, On Religion: Speeches to Its
Cultured Despisers. Religion’s cultured despisers included Schleiermacher’s
own sophisticated friends, strong advocates of Enlightenment reason.
According to them, religious beliefs were just silly superstitions. Schleiermacher’s religious despisers were thus the eighteenth century’s version of
Christopher Hitchens (2009) and Richard Dawkins (2008). In response to
religion’s cultured despisers, Schleiermacher argued that religious belief
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
originates in religious experience and thus from contact with a perceived
reality that the nonreligious either do not similarly perceive or which,
perceiving, they interpret differently.
Since Schleiermacher, religious experience has been the object of intense
study by those who address themselves to the central question about religion.
Religious experience has been well studied by philosophy, religious studies,
and psychology. In contrast, religious experience is not frequently studied
by contemporary sociologists. Why not? It might be conceptual difficulties
with the very notion of religious experience (see Yamane, 1998), although
that difficulty has not stopped other disciplines from studying it, and sociologists study all sorts of things that are conceptually problematic. Just ask
most sociologists what is meant by human agency or social structure. Alternately, it may be that qua experience, religious experience is considered more
the province of psychology (Yamane, 1998). Again, however, it would seem
that we are well past the pure sociology of Emile Durkheim’s (1982) admonishment to eschew any attention to individuals.
Perhaps, a major reason why the study of religious experience is avoided is
because its study threatens naturalism and the demarcation line supposedly
distinguishing science from nonscience. Naturalism is the view in the philosophy of science that natural, this-worldly forces and agencies are the only
causes operative in the world—or at least the only ones that can be studied
scientifically. Thus, to go beyond natural forces and agencies is to go beyond
science.
To keep the sociology of religion on the science side of the demarcation
line, Peter Berger (1967, p. 100) famously introduced a rule he called methodological atheism. It is a rule that the sociology of religion still largely follows
today. In conformity with naturalism, methodological atheism enjoins sociologists to avoid supernatural explanations of religious phenomena. It is not
that supernatural agencies are denied. But it is denied that they can be studied in a scientific manner. Thus, in order to remain scientific, sociologists of
religion are to avoid supernatural explanations and confine themselves to the
social causes of religious behavior.
For most of what is studied by the sociology of religion, methodological
atheism works quite well. There is no need, for example, to invoke supernatural agencies to explain why religiosity persists more in the United States
than in Western Europe. For such questions, social forces and agencies quite
suffice.
It is otherwise, however, when it comes to religious experience. In the case
of religious experience, we centrally confront a putative, nonnatural explanation of the phenomenon under study. Simply to set that explanation aside
in favor of an exclusively social explanation is hardly value-neutral. Rather,
in this case, methodological atheism is value-laden in favor of naturalism.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
3
A more truly neutral posture would be methodological agnosticism, which
would have us remain open-minded about supernatural realities (see Porpora, 2006). Of course, that very open-mindedness breaks from unquestioned
naturalism and thus challenges what it means to be scientific. Navigating that
challenge is itself a challenge. Nevertheless, methodological agnosticism is a
direction in which scientific discussion of religious experience seems to be
moving. This essay will end with the issues raised by this new direction and
with the potential lines of research it suggests.
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE?
What is religious experience? It is the experience of religious realities. This
preliminary formulation is meant to be less circular than it sounds. It is
meant to highlight the need to raise a prior question: What do we mean by
experience?
According to the most relevant dictionary definition, to experience is to
observe, encounter, or undergo something. Experience is thus different from
just a passing thought or belief. When we think something or believe something, we are not encountering or undergoing anything. While thoughts are
also certainly involved in experience, what the word experience distinctly
implies is an impact on us—on our thoughts and feelings in particular— of
something outside of or apart from us.
When we are analyzing experience then, there are three categories we must
consider: the subject of experience, the object of experience, and the content
of experience. The subject of experience is the person undergoing the experience. The object of experience is what that person is experiencing; what,
in other words, is having a perceptual impact on that person. The content
of experience is the nature of that impact: what is perceived and how it is
interpreted and felt. Therefore, the study of experience must encompass both
cognitions and emotions. Further, in any genuine experience, some object of
experience contributes something to the content of experience.
If normally an object of experience contributes something to the content
of experience, then experience is a way of knowing, a way of making contact
with an ontologically independent reality. It is this noetic quality that troubles
sociology when it comes to religious experience. Yet, it is with this issue that
this essay is starting to wrestle.
Having clarified what is entailed by the very category of experience,
religious experience can be defined fairly straightforwardly. Religious experience refers to an impact on us of a reality that the experiencing subject considers religious or spiritual. Thus, in short, religious experiences are putative
experiences of religious or spiritual realities. Consistently, in public opinion
polls, between a third and a half of the U.S. public reports some religious
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience. In a 2006 survey, for example, 54% of respondents who said they
believed in God also reported having personally experienced the presence
of God (Faith Matters Survey, 2006). Sometimes, other transcendental experiences are polled, as in a study by sociologist Andrew Greeley (1975), which
asked subjects whether they have ever felt they were close to a powerful,
spiritual force that lifted them out of themselves, an experience that Greeley
considered ecstasy. Over a third of respondents answered affirmatively.
THE RANGE AND FURTHER STUDY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Certainly, all three of sociology’s major founders—Emile Durkhheim, Karl
Marx, and Max Weber—addressed religion. Without perhaps calling explicit
attention to it as such, religious experience played particularly central roles
for Durkheim and Weber. For Durkheim (2008), the experience of God was
actually the experience of communitas (the local and perhaps even cosmic
community), especially in what anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1960)
and Victor Turner (2008) later called the liminal states associated with ritual
or festival.
Likewise, although now largely overlooked, religious experience figures
prominently in two of Weber’s key concepts. What after all is a calling
(Weber, 1958)? A calling is not primordially a belief, but a belief about an
experience—the sense or feeling of being summoned by something or someone outside oneself. Charisma too did not originally mean as today—simply
the charm or magnetic presence we might associate with a celebrity. For
Weber (1947), charisma was a quality within a person that others regard as
cosmic or spiritual, a quality that Rudolph Otto (1958) would go on to call
numinous. To the extent that this quality is something others feel, or at least
think they do, charisma is a matter of religious experience.
For the most part, however, for sociology, the study of religious experience
has been “the road not taken” (Yamane, 1998). Thus, religious experience has
been studied mostly by those outside of sociology. As noted, Schleiermacher
was the first to call academic attention to religious experience, focusing
particularly on what he called the feeling of absolute dependence. In part,
this feeling might be interpreted as a sense of our own contingency and even
the contingency of the entire universe, the sense of some need for ultimate
grounding. In part, too, the feeling suggests a connection to a source of
ontological sustenance. Thus, much later but in an equally seminal work,
Mircea Eliade (1987) examined how in attitudes of prayer or in sacred times
and sacred places, the religious person, what Eliade called homo religious,
taps into a felt source of greater being and greater meaning, the two virtually
coinciding.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
5
Otto’s (1958) The Idea of the Holy was equally seminal. There, among other
things, Otto introduced the notion of the numinous, that which is experienced
as wholly other, that is, beyond our ordinary, natural ken. It is what we would
experience were we to encounter a ghost or an extraterrestrial intelligence,
that is, a combination perhaps of a distinctive kind of dread, awe, and fascination. What is numinous is related to the uncanny. It is this numinous
quality that is built both into charisma as originally understood and into the
idea of God as found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Perhaps, the most well known among social scientists is William James.
With a father who was a Swedenborgian, William James was not only an
early president of the American Psychological Association but also a founder
of the still extant American Society for Psychic Research. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1961) canvassed many of the different forms taken
by religious experience. Although many of these forms were quite dramatic
and unusual, some were quite ordinary. Among the latter was what James
(1961, p. 62) called a primordial experience of something there: “It is as if
there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call ’something there,’ more deep and
more general than any of the special and particular ’senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.” Later,
in his controversial book, Honest to God, Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson
(1963) would call this feeling of something there an apprehension of a depth
dimension to reality.
One other very important figure in the study of religious experience was
biologist Alister Hardy. A professor of marine biology at Oxford University,
after his retirement, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre. Housed now at the Lampeter branch of the University of Wales, the center
has accumulated thousands of accounts of people’s religious experience and
sponsors further research on the subject. Interested scholars are invited to
peruse these archives, but one must physically visit Lampeter to do so.
STANDARD SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION
Currently, there are two major sociological approaches to the study of religion: rational choice theory and social constructionism. Neither affords much
place to religious experience.
Rational choice theory, the less dominant of the two approaches, seeks to
represent religious behavior as a rational choice. The problem with rational
choice theory is that the only form of rationality recognized is instrumental
reason, what Weber (1947) termed Zweck Rationalität. Rational choice theory
essentially argues that it is rational for people to pray to or otherwise propitiate their gods insofar as people expect to receive something in return from
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
their gods. If the putative gods exist, it may well be instrumentally rational
to pray to or otherwise propitiate them, but is it rational in the first place
to believe in their existence? This question concerns not instrumental but
epistemic rationality, a matter that appears beyond the ken of rational choice
theory, as if it too, like religious realities, were wholly other.
The question of epistemic rationality is actually also evaded by social
constructionism, the second and more dominant sociological approach to
religion. As a theoretical paradigm, social constructionism was initiated
in 1967 by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) classic The Social
Construction of Reality. Berger subsequently applied social constructionism
specifically to religion in The Sacred Canopy.
It was in The Sacred Canopy that Berger (1967, p. 100) introduced the principle of methodological atheism. Religious himself, Berger’s intent was not to
promote actual atheism. It was quite the opposite. In part, Berger was trying
only to separate science from nonscience. In part, by doing so, Berger was
seeking to secure religion from scientific reductionism.
Since the work of Berger and Luckmann, social constructionism has become
a common default stance among sociologists and not just in application to
religion. By the end of the last century, particularly with the rise of feminism
and other social identity movements, social theorists were declaring everything a social construction. Gender was socially constructed and race, then
even science and, finally, all reality.
There was of course an element of truth to all these claims, and in some
cases such as gender and race, much more than an element. Race, in particular, appears to be nothing but a social construction. In many cases, however,
including religion, it is the “nothing but” suggestion that is the sticking point
with social constructionism.
What does it even mean for something to be socially constructed? Social
constructionism holds—quite reasonably—that we have no uninterpreted
access to reality. Instead, we always grasp reality via one or another interpretation. Such interpretations, furthermore, are always socially and culturally
shaped. Thus, it is the job of the sociologist to describe just how our interpretations of things are socially and culturally shaped.
What about objective reality, reality as it is in itself, apart from any human
interpretation? Along with social and cultural shaping, does not objective
reality contribute something to our interpretations of reality? This question
has tended to strike sociologists—including Berger and Luckmann—as
philosophical, a matter of epistemology beyond the scope of sociology. The
question thus has tended to be bracketed out of sociological discussion.
Instead, sociologists have understood their mandate to be the examination
solely of the social and cultural influences on reality construction. For sociologists, the question of ultimate or objective reality has thereby been evaded.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
7
Of course, in all social constructionist works, the evasion of the ontological question is more apparent than real. There is a difference between what
people consider reality and what reality actually is, that is, the distinction
originally made by philosopher Emmanuel Kant between phenomenal and
noumenal reality. As for Kant, the default stance of social constructionism is
that the twain never meet.
So it has been from the beginning with the social constructionist approach
to religion. From the scientific, sociological point of view, Berger (1967, p. 100)
argued that religion is just a phenomenal projection of purely human ideas
onto the otherwise blank screen of the noumenal world. Any putative contribution to human religion from the other side—from, that is, noumenal or
objective reality–was beyond scientific inquiry. Thus, in the end, The Sacred
Canopy mirrored proto-Marxist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1989) The
Essence of Christianity, rendering religion nothing but a human projection
onto the world. Such was the logical result of methodological atheism.
FROM METHODOLOGICAL ATHEISM
TO METHODOLOGICAL AGNOSTICISM
Much later, Berger would become very critical of the direction taken by much
of what came to be argued by social constructionists. Yet, even before, Berger
seemingly became disenchanted even with his own methodological atheism.
After all, whereas Berger had started out protesting the conceptual liquidation of religious reality by sociology, his own methodological rule seemed to
produce that very effect. Thus, in books such as A Rumor of Angels (Berger,
1970) and The Heretical Imperative (Berger, 1979), addressed more to theologians than to sociologists, Berger seemed to suggest that religious experience
offers a nonscientific way of knowing that does in fact put people in touch
with objective religious reality. In religious experience, Berger (1979, p. 59)
argued, “there are indicators of a reality that is truly ‘other’ and that the religious imagination of man ultimately reflects.”
Here, Berger’s admission seems entirely to vitiate the principle of methodological atheism. If theologians and subjects of religious experience can
access objective, noumenal religious reality, why cannot sociologists?
Perhaps, it may be argued, because unlike theology and the subjects of
religious experience, a truly scientific sociology must maintain a stance of
value-neutrality. Leave aside for the moment that the positivist (and Weberian) ideal of value-neutrality in science has by now been completely discredited. Suffice it to say that, as noted, the principle of methodological atheism
is not itself value-neutral; it is instead an a priori endorsement of naturalism.
Not only value-laden, social constructionism’s programmatic exclusion of
objective reality is philosophically untenable. In the first place, such exclusion
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
obliterates the very category of experience. Recall that in any genuine experience, the object of experience (noumenal reality) contributes something to
the content of experience. Thus, insofar as social constructionism would have
us ignore any contribution to the content of experience from the noumenal
object of experience, it excludes from consideration all genuine experience.
The implications are injurious even to sociology’s scientific pretentions. If
the world’s contribution to knowledge is always to be bracketed out from the
start, then the constructedness of reality is effectively removed from empirical contestation and surreptitiously fixed instead as an unfalsifiable, disciplinary premise.
It gets worse. It is assumed that the social and extra-social parts of religion
are easily partitioned, permitting an a priori focus on the one and a bracketing
of the other. Yet, if there are no uninterpreted experiences, if all reality comes
to us already saturated with interpretation, then the extra-socially real and
the socially interpreted cannot so easily be prized apart. They confront us
rather as a mangle.
If the extra-socially real and the socially interpreted comprise a mangle,
then we cannot know in advance which is which. Instead, the two can only
be separated empirically case by case. Thus, unless the extra-social is admitted to empirical examination as well, the result will be to treat all as socially
constructed—including what is not. Then, despite what sociology may think,
it will not have shown anything to be socially constructed because its investigation will have failed to rule out what is extra-social.
The upshot is that in the case of religious experience specifically, sociology cannot avoid investigating any putatively extra-social contribution. The
extra-social cannot legitimately be banished by a transcendental a priori. It
must, rather, be approached empirically. Methodological atheism then must
be abandoned in favor of what may be called methodological agnosticism.
Whereas methodological atheism excludes the possibility that the objects of
religious experience are real, methodological agnosticism makes no such a
priori judgment. Instead, any such judgment is always the result of empirical
investigation.
CAN IT BE DONE?
When it comes to religious experience, can methodological agnosticism
really be practiced? Methodological agnosticism not only can be practiced, it
has been and is increasingly being practiced. Actually, the open-mindedness
of methodological agnosticism was the stance all along of William James,
who appreciated how the specifically passive and noetic qualities of religious experience pointed to an independent object of experience. In other
The Sociology of Religious Experience
9
words, James’s presumption was that people with religious experience were
genuinely experiencing something real; the question was what.
Subsequent work in psychology has continued in the Jamesian tradition.
Most notable is a large compendium of work on anomalous experience
published by the American Psychological Association. Called Varieties of
Anomalous Experience, the Jamesian connection is clear (Cardena, Lynn, &
Krippner, 2004). The handbook encompasses research on such phenomena as
near-death, psi-related, hallucinatory, past-life, and out-of-body experiences.
The work canvassed by the handbook is remarkable in a number of
respects. Remarkable in the first place is just the consideration given to
the category of experience. Equally remarkable for a publication of the
American Psychological Association is how interdisciplinary the work is.
Represented along with psychology is psychiatry, medicine, physiology,
parapsychology, history, anthropology, and even a sociologist or two.
The refreshing intent seems to be not to affirm a discipline but to answer
questions. Most remarkable of all, however, is the consideration given by
various pieces to allegedly paranormal phenomena. The paranormal is not
ruled out from the start as would be required by a naturalist presupposition.
Instead, the evidence is followed wherever it seems to lead.
Some of the most interesting of the current psychological works on
religious experience come from neuroscience. Using neuroimaging, for
example, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili (2001) have shown
that intense prayer and meditation affect the experiential centers of the
brain. Empirically demonstrated thereby is that we are dealing not simply
with belief but also with experience. Again, of course, the actual object of
experience remains a matter of debate.
Equally open at the moment to fascinating debate is the object or cause of
so-called near-death experiences (NDEs), experiences many people report
after cardiac resuscitation and even after apparent cessation of brain activity
of various encounters with tunnels, a welcoming, embracing light, and
deceased relatives. Physiological processes seemingly cannot be the full
explanation as sociologists such as Allan Kellehear (1996) demonstrated
that what is experienced varies culturally. The very same evidence, however, suggests that the experience is not completely a social construction,
for it seems to be found across cultures. Overall, the study of NDEs is a
burgeoning field, to which sociologists can and should contribute more.
TOWARD A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR SOCIOLOGY
ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The foregoing considerations all point to the possibility of a new
research agenda for sociology around an alternative theory of religious
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience—and of religion generally. For want of a better name, call the
theory the transcendental signal theory (TST). TST hypothesizes a transcendental or depth dimension to reality that can variously make itself felt in
human experience. The theory further hypothesizes that it is experiential
connection with such reality that explains why many people are religious.
That is not to say that all people are religious exclusively or even at all for
this reason. Doubtlessly, many practice religion out of fear, out of hope for
an afterlife, in search of community, or from simple inertia. It is possible,
however, even for many of these people that part of what makes them
religious is an experiential connection with some transcendental reality.
Of course, because there are no observations without interpretation, the
hypothesized transcendental signal always comes through embedded in
one or another cultural tradition, which, from a cosmic point of view, might
be considered noise.
TST seems to be the direction that Berger himself was moving in his
extra-sociological writings. It is a theory that makes sense of the historical
trajectory of liberal, mainline Protestantism, the scholarly attempt of which
has always been to better separate noise from signal and to be better open to
the possible diversity of signals out there to be received.
TST can likewise help us avoid what is called the “derogation of the lay
actor” (Giddens, 1993), the tendency to advance theories that insufficiently
credit the intelligence of lay actors. According to TST, there is something or
some things transcendentally real to which even the holders of otherwise
untenable religious beliefs are responding. The trouble is, according to the
theory, that insofar as the message received embodies both universal, transcendental signal and local, culturally interpreted human noise, the tendency
is for people to absolutize the entire message. Although, for example, some
divine reality may shine through the Bible, the Koran, or the Talmud, fundamentalist believers in these sacred books, correctly detecting in them, according to the theory, some real transcendental signal, nevertheless incorrectly
canonize the whole as if it were signal in its entirety. Because, however, TST
assumes something real and valuable to which even fundamentalist believers are responding, it does not go so far as to denigrate their cognitions as
complete illusion.
Yet one more novel feature of TST is its refusal to privilege the religious
inexperience of atheists. If it makes sense to research the extent to which
experiences deemed religious are socially constructed, it makes equal sense
to research how atheists socially construct nonreligious interpretations of the
same or kindred experiences. Herein lies a course of sociological research that
seems to have been rarely, if ever, touched.
All well and good, it might be said, but TST nonetheless is audacious in its
departure from naturalism and methodological atheism. Can such a theory
The Sociology of Religious Experience
11
even be empirically tested? In answer, as we have already observed, if TST
cannot be empirically tested then neither can social constructionism nor,
indeed, any other encompassing sociological theory of religion. The reason
is that TST must at least be refuted as an alternate hypothesis in order to
vindicate any of the other sociological theories. And if TST is to be refuted,
it must first be fairly entertained. Thus, whether it proves right or wrong,
TST needs to be considered by sociology. Doing so, returns sociology to the
biggest of questions: Why are people religious?
To be sure, there are important empirical and conceptual questions to be
asked of TST. Those questions are currently being asked, although with the
exception of a few such as Margaret Poloma and Matthew Lee, the questioners are mostly outside of sociology. Consider Ann Taves, for example, in
religious studies. Her (2009) Religious Experience Reconsidered collects most of
the questions researchers across disciplines are currently asking about something like TST (see also Poloma and Hood 2008).
As multiple disciplines are pursuing this research agenda, different
questions come from different disciplines. An important question from the
humanities, for example, reflects the turn there to language and discourse.
As David Yamane (2000) in sociology has also asked, can we researchers
access religious experience directly or is it rather only subjects’ discourse
about religious experience that we actually study? It is an important question, although the stark either/or contrast seems overdrawn. It is like asking
whether we can ever study quarks directly or just discourse about quarks.
Although radical constructionists might favor the latter view, it is then not
just religious reality that fades away.
A similarly large and much contested question is whether there are at least
some experiences that are irreducibly or sui generis religious or whether all
experiences must rather await subjects’ ascription to them of religious or
nonreligious character. Schleiermacher, Otto, and Eliade all tended toward
the former view whereas James and, more recently, Wayne Proudfood (1987)
tend toward the latter. With push back from philosophers such as Robert
Forman (2008), this debate is currently at a standoff. Sociologists might contribute their own insights.
The work being done is not just conceptual. A number of multidisciplinary
ethnographies, some including sociologists Margaret Poloma and Matthew
Lee, have been studying new paradigm or emerging church, an evangelical
but nonfundamentalist Christianity that emphasizes divine love and a direct
experience of God (Poloma and Hood 2008; Lee and Poloma 2012). In When
God Talks Back, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2012) sets out to learn how
it is that God comes to be experienced as real for people in this movement.
Luhrmann’s findings are fascinating. Admittedly, she begins from the perspective of methodological atheism, claiming only to study the human side
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of things and denying any ability to comment on objective reality itself. Her
analysis, however, moves beyond this position, framing what practitioners
do less as construction than as learning new perceptual skills and forms of
attention, a frame leaving open the possibility that some objective reality is
actually being detected and not simply projected. In the end, Luhrmann confesses to having learned herself to experience an element of what might be
considered transcendent reality.
Three other books looking with a different emphasis at this movement are
The Science and Theology of Godly Love, edited by Mathew T. Lee and Amos
Young (2012), Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church, written by Margaret Poloma and psychologist of religion Ralph W. Hood (2008),
and The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the
Experience of God’s Love (Lee and Poloma 2012). All three works are part of
a 3-year project funded by the Templeton Foundation to research the experience and expression of Godly Love in the Pentecostal tradition. They examine
specifically how God’s love is experienced and in response practiced. The
first volume expressly advertises itself as rooted in methodological agnosticism, and the Poloma and Hood team likewise describe their research as so
guided. What distinguishes this work, particularly that of Poloma and Hood,
is its extensive examination of the causal effects of a particular kind of religious experience on social movement formation. This direction could mark a
new research agenda for sociology, one that connects with Christian Smith’s
(1996) Resisting Reagan, which similarly examined the religious roots of the
Central America Solidarity movement in the 1980s.
As can be seen, scholars in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and religion are all currently pursuing research that, if it does not quite go by the
name of TST, at least seems to move away from the stance of methodological atheism and more in the direction of methodological agnosticism. Doing
so raises questions that sociologists have heretofore tended to ignore but to
which their own expertise could ably contribute. Perhaps in doing so the
whole sociology of religion might be invigorated.
REFERENCES
Berger, P. (1967). The sacred canopy: Elements of a sociological theory of religion. New
York, NY: Doubleday.
Berger, P. (1970). A rumor of angels: Modern society and the rediscovery of the supernatural.
New York, NY: Doubleday.
Berger, P. (1979). The heretical imperative: Contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Berger, P., & Luckmann, T. (1967). The social construction of reality. New York, NY:
Anchor.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
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Cardena, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.) (2004). The varieties of anomalous
experience. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Dawkins, R. (2008). The God delusion. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
Durkheim, E. (1982). The rules of the sociological method. New York, NY: Free Press.
Durkheim, E. (2008). The elementary forms of the religious life. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Eliade, M. (1987). The sacred and the profane. The nature of religion. Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich: San Diego, CA.
Faith Matters Survey (2006). Retrieved Dec-8-2012 from the iPOLL Databank,
The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, University of Connecticut.
http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu.ezproxy2.library.drexel.edu/data_access/
ipoll/ipoll.html.
Feuerbach, L. (1989). The essence of Christianity. New York, NY: Prometheus Books.
Forman, R. K. (2008). Neuroscience, consciousness and spirituality conference, July
2–4, 2008 Freiburg, Germany. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15(8), 110–115.
Giddens, A. (1993). The new rules of the sociological method. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Greeley, A. (1975). Ecstasy: A way of knowing. New York, NY: Prentice Hall.
Hitchens, C. (2009). God is not great. How religion spoils everything. East Providence,
RI: Twelve.
James, W. (1961). The varieties of religious experience. New York, NY: CollierMacMillan.
Kellehear, A. (1996). Experiences near death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Poloma, M. (2012). The heart of religion: Spiritual empowerment, benevolence, and the experience of God’s love. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Yong, A. (Eds.) (2012). The science and theology of Godly love. deKalb, IL:
NIU Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical
relationship with God. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Newberg, A., & D’Aquili, E. (2001). Why God won’t go away. New York, NY: Ballantine.
Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. Oxford: New York, NY.
Poloma, M. M., & Hood, R. W., Jr., (2008). Blood and fire: Godly love in a Pentecostal
emerging church. New York: New York University Press.
Porpora, D. V. (2006). Methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism, and religious experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 57–75.
Proudfood, W. (1987). Religious experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robinson, J. A. T. (1963). Honest to God. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.
Schleiermacher, F. (1996). On religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers. New York, NY:
Cambridge University Press.
Smith, C. (1996). Resisting Reagan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study
of religion and other special things. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Turner, V. (2008). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New Brunswick,
Canada: Aldine Transaction Press.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization. New York, NY: The
Free Press.
Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New York, NY: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
Yamane, D. (1998). Religious experience. In W. Jr. Swatos (Ed.), The encyclopedia of
religion and society (pp. 179–182). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Yamane, D. (2000). Narrative and religious experience. Sociology of Religion, 61,
171–189.
FURTHER READING
Alston, W. (1991). Perceiving God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bender, C. (2010). The new metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American religious
imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Neitz, M., & Spickard, J. (1989). Steps toward a sociology of religious experience: The
theories of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and Alfred Schutz. Sociological Analysis, 50(2),
15–34.
Porpora, D. V. (2001). Landscapes of the soul: The Loss of moral meaning in American life.
Oxford: New York, NY.
Yamane, D., & Polzer, M. (1994). Ways of seeing ecstasy in modern society:
Experiential-expressive and cultural-linguistic Views. Sociological Analysis, 55,
1–25.
DOUGLAS PORPORA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Porpora is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture
and Communication at Drexel University. He is an active member of NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby for Women Religious.
He writes mainly on social theory, but his books with similar theme include
Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (2001,
Oxford University Press), Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2004,
Routledge), and most recently, Post-Ethical Society: The Attack on Iraq, Abu
Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular (2014 University of Chicago
Press).
RELATED ESSAYS
Lived Religion (Sociology), Nancy T. Ammerman
Gender, Religion, and State in the Middle East (Sociology), Mounira M. Charrad and Amina Zarrugh
Institutional Change in American Religion (Sociology), Casey Clevenger and
Wendy Cadge
The Sociology of Religious Experience
15
Niche Construction: Implications for Human Sciences (Anthropology), Kevin
N. Laland and Michael O’Brien
Mysticism (Sociology), Barry Markovsky and Jake Frederick
Religion (Anthropology), Benjamin Grant Purzycki et al.
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Irreligion (Sociology), Buster G. Smith and Joseph
O. Baker
The Sociology of Religious
Experience
DOUGLAS PORPORA
Abstract
This essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context
of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle
of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly
excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other
disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological
atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism.
This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up.
INTRODUCTION
The most basic question we can ask about religion is the one sociologists do
not normally ask. Why are people religious? Or why are some people religious and not others?
When we ask this question, religious experience assumes central place.
Perhaps, one important reason why some people are religious and others
are not is because in contrast with the nonreligious, many religious people
experience or at least believe they experience religious realities. Experiencing
those realities or believing they do, such religious people believe in those
realities and, hence, are religious.
An answer along the above lines was first given by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1996) in 1799 when he released his tome, On Religion: Speeches to Its
Cultured Despisers. Religion’s cultured despisers included Schleiermacher’s
own sophisticated friends, strong advocates of Enlightenment reason.
According to them, religious beliefs were just silly superstitions. Schleiermacher’s religious despisers were thus the eighteenth century’s version of
Christopher Hitchens (2009) and Richard Dawkins (2008). In response to
religion’s cultured despisers, Schleiermacher argued that religious belief
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
originates in religious experience and thus from contact with a perceived
reality that the nonreligious either do not similarly perceive or which,
perceiving, they interpret differently.
Since Schleiermacher, religious experience has been the object of intense
study by those who address themselves to the central question about religion.
Religious experience has been well studied by philosophy, religious studies,
and psychology. In contrast, religious experience is not frequently studied
by contemporary sociologists. Why not? It might be conceptual difficulties
with the very notion of religious experience (see Yamane, 1998), although
that difficulty has not stopped other disciplines from studying it, and sociologists study all sorts of things that are conceptually problematic. Just ask
most sociologists what is meant by human agency or social structure. Alternately, it may be that qua experience, religious experience is considered more
the province of psychology (Yamane, 1998). Again, however, it would seem
that we are well past the pure sociology of Emile Durkheim’s (1982) admonishment to eschew any attention to individuals.
Perhaps, a major reason why the study of religious experience is avoided is
because its study threatens naturalism and the demarcation line supposedly
distinguishing science from nonscience. Naturalism is the view in the philosophy of science that natural, this-worldly forces and agencies are the only
causes operative in the world—or at least the only ones that can be studied
scientifically. Thus, to go beyond natural forces and agencies is to go beyond
science.
To keep the sociology of religion on the science side of the demarcation
line, Peter Berger (1967, p. 100) famously introduced a rule he called methodological atheism. It is a rule that the sociology of religion still largely follows
today. In conformity with naturalism, methodological atheism enjoins sociologists to avoid supernatural explanations of religious phenomena. It is not
that supernatural agencies are denied. But it is denied that they can be studied in a scientific manner. Thus, in order to remain scientific, sociologists of
religion are to avoid supernatural explanations and confine themselves to the
social causes of religious behavior.
For most of what is studied by the sociology of religion, methodological
atheism works quite well. There is no need, for example, to invoke supernatural agencies to explain why religiosity persists more in the United States
than in Western Europe. For such questions, social forces and agencies quite
suffice.
It is otherwise, however, when it comes to religious experience. In the case
of religious experience, we centrally confront a putative, nonnatural explanation of the phenomenon under study. Simply to set that explanation aside
in favor of an exclusively social explanation is hardly value-neutral. Rather,
in this case, methodological atheism is value-laden in favor of naturalism.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
3
A more truly neutral posture would be methodological agnosticism, which
would have us remain open-minded about supernatural realities (see Porpora, 2006). Of course, that very open-mindedness breaks from unquestioned
naturalism and thus challenges what it means to be scientific. Navigating that
challenge is itself a challenge. Nevertheless, methodological agnosticism is a
direction in which scientific discussion of religious experience seems to be
moving. This essay will end with the issues raised by this new direction and
with the potential lines of research it suggests.
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE?
What is religious experience? It is the experience of religious realities. This
preliminary formulation is meant to be less circular than it sounds. It is
meant to highlight the need to raise a prior question: What do we mean by
experience?
According to the most relevant dictionary definition, to experience is to
observe, encounter, or undergo something. Experience is thus different from
just a passing thought or belief. When we think something or believe something, we are not encountering or undergoing anything. While thoughts are
also certainly involved in experience, what the word experience distinctly
implies is an impact on us—on our thoughts and feelings in particular— of
something outside of or apart from us.
When we are analyzing experience then, there are three categories we must
consider: the subject of experience, the object of experience, and the content
of experience. The subject of experience is the person undergoing the experience. The object of experience is what that person is experiencing; what,
in other words, is having a perceptual impact on that person. The content
of experience is the nature of that impact: what is perceived and how it is
interpreted and felt. Therefore, the study of experience must encompass both
cognitions and emotions. Further, in any genuine experience, some object of
experience contributes something to the content of experience.
If normally an object of experience contributes something to the content
of experience, then experience is a way of knowing, a way of making contact
with an ontologically independent reality. It is this noetic quality that troubles
sociology when it comes to religious experience. Yet, it is with this issue that
this essay is starting to wrestle.
Having clarified what is entailed by the very category of experience,
religious experience can be defined fairly straightforwardly. Religious experience refers to an impact on us of a reality that the experiencing subject considers religious or spiritual. Thus, in short, religious experiences are putative
experiences of religious or spiritual realities. Consistently, in public opinion
polls, between a third and a half of the U.S. public reports some religious
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience. In a 2006 survey, for example, 54% of respondents who said they
believed in God also reported having personally experienced the presence
of God (Faith Matters Survey, 2006). Sometimes, other transcendental experiences are polled, as in a study by sociologist Andrew Greeley (1975), which
asked subjects whether they have ever felt they were close to a powerful,
spiritual force that lifted them out of themselves, an experience that Greeley
considered ecstasy. Over a third of respondents answered affirmatively.
THE RANGE AND FURTHER STUDY OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Certainly, all three of sociology’s major founders—Emile Durkhheim, Karl
Marx, and Max Weber—addressed religion. Without perhaps calling explicit
attention to it as such, religious experience played particularly central roles
for Durkheim and Weber. For Durkheim (2008), the experience of God was
actually the experience of communitas (the local and perhaps even cosmic
community), especially in what anthropologists Arnold van Gennep (1960)
and Victor Turner (2008) later called the liminal states associated with ritual
or festival.
Likewise, although now largely overlooked, religious experience figures
prominently in two of Weber’s key concepts. What after all is a calling
(Weber, 1958)? A calling is not primordially a belief, but a belief about an
experience—the sense or feeling of being summoned by something or someone outside oneself. Charisma too did not originally mean as today—simply
the charm or magnetic presence we might associate with a celebrity. For
Weber (1947), charisma was a quality within a person that others regard as
cosmic or spiritual, a quality that Rudolph Otto (1958) would go on to call
numinous. To the extent that this quality is something others feel, or at least
think they do, charisma is a matter of religious experience.
For the most part, however, for sociology, the study of religious experience
has been “the road not taken” (Yamane, 1998). Thus, religious experience has
been studied mostly by those outside of sociology. As noted, Schleiermacher
was the first to call academic attention to religious experience, focusing
particularly on what he called the feeling of absolute dependence. In part,
this feeling might be interpreted as a sense of our own contingency and even
the contingency of the entire universe, the sense of some need for ultimate
grounding. In part, too, the feeling suggests a connection to a source of
ontological sustenance. Thus, much later but in an equally seminal work,
Mircea Eliade (1987) examined how in attitudes of prayer or in sacred times
and sacred places, the religious person, what Eliade called homo religious,
taps into a felt source of greater being and greater meaning, the two virtually
coinciding.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
5
Otto’s (1958) The Idea of the Holy was equally seminal. There, among other
things, Otto introduced the notion of the numinous, that which is experienced
as wholly other, that is, beyond our ordinary, natural ken. It is what we would
experience were we to encounter a ghost or an extraterrestrial intelligence,
that is, a combination perhaps of a distinctive kind of dread, awe, and fascination. What is numinous is related to the uncanny. It is this numinous
quality that is built both into charisma as originally understood and into the
idea of God as found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Perhaps, the most well known among social scientists is William James.
With a father who was a Swedenborgian, William James was not only an
early president of the American Psychological Association but also a founder
of the still extant American Society for Psychic Research. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James (1961) canvassed many of the different forms taken
by religious experience. Although many of these forms were quite dramatic
and unusual, some were quite ordinary. Among the latter was what James
(1961, p. 62) called a primordial experience of something there: “It is as if
there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call ’something there,’ more deep and
more general than any of the special and particular ’senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.” Later,
in his controversial book, Honest to God, Anglican Bishop John A.T. Robinson
(1963) would call this feeling of something there an apprehension of a depth
dimension to reality.
One other very important figure in the study of religious experience was
biologist Alister Hardy. A professor of marine biology at Oxford University,
after his retirement, Hardy founded the Religious Experience Research Centre. Housed now at the Lampeter branch of the University of Wales, the center
has accumulated thousands of accounts of people’s religious experience and
sponsors further research on the subject. Interested scholars are invited to
peruse these archives, but one must physically visit Lampeter to do so.
STANDARD SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION
Currently, there are two major sociological approaches to the study of religion: rational choice theory and social constructionism. Neither affords much
place to religious experience.
Rational choice theory, the less dominant of the two approaches, seeks to
represent religious behavior as a rational choice. The problem with rational
choice theory is that the only form of rationality recognized is instrumental
reason, what Weber (1947) termed Zweck Rationalität. Rational choice theory
essentially argues that it is rational for people to pray to or otherwise propitiate their gods insofar as people expect to receive something in return from
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
their gods. If the putative gods exist, it may well be instrumentally rational
to pray to or otherwise propitiate them, but is it rational in the first place
to believe in their existence? This question concerns not instrumental but
epistemic rationality, a matter that appears beyond the ken of rational choice
theory, as if it too, like religious realities, were wholly other.
The question of epistemic rationality is actually also evaded by social
constructionism, the second and more dominant sociological approach to
religion. As a theoretical paradigm, social constructionism was initiated
in 1967 by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s (1967) classic The Social
Construction of Reality. Berger subsequently applied social constructionism
specifically to religion in The Sacred Canopy.
It was in The Sacred Canopy that Berger (1967, p. 100) introduced the principle of methodological atheism. Religious himself, Berger’s intent was not to
promote actual atheism. It was quite the opposite. In part, Berger was trying
only to separate science from nonscience. In part, by doing so, Berger was
seeking to secure religion from scientific reductionism.
Since the work of Berger and Luckmann, social constructionism has become
a common default stance among sociologists and not just in application to
religion. By the end of the last century, particularly with the rise of feminism
and other social identity movements, social theorists were declaring everything a social construction. Gender was socially constructed and race, then
even science and, finally, all reality.
There was of course an element of truth to all these claims, and in some
cases such as gender and race, much more than an element. Race, in particular, appears to be nothing but a social construction. In many cases, however,
including religion, it is the “nothing but” suggestion that is the sticking point
with social constructionism.
What does it even mean for something to be socially constructed? Social
constructionism holds—quite reasonably—that we have no uninterpreted
access to reality. Instead, we always grasp reality via one or another interpretation. Such interpretations, furthermore, are always socially and culturally
shaped. Thus, it is the job of the sociologist to describe just how our interpretations of things are socially and culturally shaped.
What about objective reality, reality as it is in itself, apart from any human
interpretation? Along with social and cultural shaping, does not objective
reality contribute something to our interpretations of reality? This question
has tended to strike sociologists—including Berger and Luckmann—as
philosophical, a matter of epistemology beyond the scope of sociology. The
question thus has tended to be bracketed out of sociological discussion.
Instead, sociologists have understood their mandate to be the examination
solely of the social and cultural influences on reality construction. For sociologists, the question of ultimate or objective reality has thereby been evaded.
The Sociology of Religious Experience
7
Of course, in all social constructionist works, the evasion of the ontological question is more apparent than real. There is a difference between what
people consider reality and what reality actually is, that is, the distinction
originally made by philosopher Emmanuel Kant between phenomenal and
noumenal reality. As for Kant, the default stance of social constructionism is
that the twain never meet.
So it has been from the beginning with the social constructionist approach
to religion. From the scientific, sociological point of view, Berger (1967, p. 100)
argued that religion is just a phenomenal projection of purely human ideas
onto the otherwise blank screen of the noumenal world. Any putative contribution to human religion from the other side—from, that is, noumenal or
objective reality–was beyond scientific inquiry. Thus, in the end, The Sacred
Canopy mirrored proto-Marxist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s (1989) The
Essence of Christianity, rendering religion nothing but a human projection
onto the world. Such was the logical result of methodological atheism.
FROM METHODOLOGICAL ATHEISM
TO METHODOLOGICAL AGNOSTICISM
Much later, Berger would become very critical of the direction taken by much
of what came to be argued by social constructionists. Yet, even before, Berger
seemingly became disenchanted even with his own methodological atheism.
After all, whereas Berger had started out protesting the conceptual liquidation of religious reality by sociology, his own methodological rule seemed to
produce that very effect. Thus, in books such as A Rumor of Angels (Berger,
1970) and The Heretical Imperative (Berger, 1979), addressed more to theologians than to sociologists, Berger seemed to suggest that religious experience
offers a nonscientific way of knowing that does in fact put people in touch
with objective religious reality. In religious experience, Berger (1979, p. 59)
argued, “there are indicators of a reality that is truly ‘other’ and that the religious imagination of man ultimately reflects.”
Here, Berger’s admission seems entirely to vitiate the principle of methodological atheism. If theologians and subjects of religious experience can
access objective, noumenal religious reality, why cannot sociologists?
Perhaps, it may be argued, because unlike theology and the subjects of
religious experience, a truly scientific sociology must maintain a stance of
value-neutrality. Leave aside for the moment that the positivist (and Weberian) ideal of value-neutrality in science has by now been completely discredited. Suffice it to say that, as noted, the principle of methodological atheism
is not itself value-neutral; it is instead an a priori endorsement of naturalism.
Not only value-laden, social constructionism’s programmatic exclusion of
objective reality is philosophically untenable. In the first place, such exclusion
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
obliterates the very category of experience. Recall that in any genuine experience, the object of experience (noumenal reality) contributes something to
the content of experience. Thus, insofar as social constructionism would have
us ignore any contribution to the content of experience from the noumenal
object of experience, it excludes from consideration all genuine experience.
The implications are injurious even to sociology’s scientific pretentions. If
the world’s contribution to knowledge is always to be bracketed out from the
start, then the constructedness of reality is effectively removed from empirical contestation and surreptitiously fixed instead as an unfalsifiable, disciplinary premise.
It gets worse. It is assumed that the social and extra-social parts of religion
are easily partitioned, permitting an a priori focus on the one and a bracketing
of the other. Yet, if there are no uninterpreted experiences, if all reality comes
to us already saturated with interpretation, then the extra-socially real and
the socially interpreted cannot so easily be prized apart. They confront us
rather as a mangle.
If the extra-socially real and the socially interpreted comprise a mangle,
then we cannot know in advance which is which. Instead, the two can only
be separated empirically case by case. Thus, unless the extra-social is admitted to empirical examination as well, the result will be to treat all as socially
constructed—including what is not. Then, despite what sociology may think,
it will not have shown anything to be socially constructed because its investigation will have failed to rule out what is extra-social.
The upshot is that in the case of religious experience specifically, sociology cannot avoid investigating any putatively extra-social contribution. The
extra-social cannot legitimately be banished by a transcendental a priori. It
must, rather, be approached empirically. Methodological atheism then must
be abandoned in favor of what may be called methodological agnosticism.
Whereas methodological atheism excludes the possibility that the objects of
religious experience are real, methodological agnosticism makes no such a
priori judgment. Instead, any such judgment is always the result of empirical
investigation.
CAN IT BE DONE?
When it comes to religious experience, can methodological agnosticism
really be practiced? Methodological agnosticism not only can be practiced, it
has been and is increasingly being practiced. Actually, the open-mindedness
of methodological agnosticism was the stance all along of William James,
who appreciated how the specifically passive and noetic qualities of religious experience pointed to an independent object of experience. In other
The Sociology of Religious Experience
9
words, James’s presumption was that people with religious experience were
genuinely experiencing something real; the question was what.
Subsequent work in psychology has continued in the Jamesian tradition.
Most notable is a large compendium of work on anomalous experience
published by the American Psychological Association. Called Varieties of
Anomalous Experience, the Jamesian connection is clear (Cardena, Lynn, &
Krippner, 2004). The handbook encompasses research on such phenomena as
near-death, psi-related, hallucinatory, past-life, and out-of-body experiences.
The work canvassed by the handbook is remarkable in a number of
respects. Remarkable in the first place is just the consideration given to
the category of experience. Equally remarkable for a publication of the
American Psychological Association is how interdisciplinary the work is.
Represented along with psychology is psychiatry, medicine, physiology,
parapsychology, history, anthropology, and even a sociologist or two.
The refreshing intent seems to be not to affirm a discipline but to answer
questions. Most remarkable of all, however, is the consideration given by
various pieces to allegedly paranormal phenomena. The paranormal is not
ruled out from the start as would be required by a naturalist presupposition.
Instead, the evidence is followed wherever it seems to lead.
Some of the most interesting of the current psychological works on
religious experience come from neuroscience. Using neuroimaging, for
example, Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili (2001) have shown
that intense prayer and meditation affect the experiential centers of the
brain. Empirically demonstrated thereby is that we are dealing not simply
with belief but also with experience. Again, of course, the actual object of
experience remains a matter of debate.
Equally open at the moment to fascinating debate is the object or cause of
so-called near-death experiences (NDEs), experiences many people report
after cardiac resuscitation and even after apparent cessation of brain activity
of various encounters with tunnels, a welcoming, embracing light, and
deceased relatives. Physiological processes seemingly cannot be the full
explanation as sociologists such as Allan Kellehear (1996) demonstrated
that what is experienced varies culturally. The very same evidence, however, suggests that the experience is not completely a social construction,
for it seems to be found across cultures. Overall, the study of NDEs is a
burgeoning field, to which sociologists can and should contribute more.
TOWARD A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA FOR SOCIOLOGY
ON RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The foregoing considerations all point to the possibility of a new
research agenda for sociology around an alternative theory of religious
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
experience—and of religion generally. For want of a better name, call the
theory the transcendental signal theory (TST). TST hypothesizes a transcendental or depth dimension to reality that can variously make itself felt in
human experience. The theory further hypothesizes that it is experiential
connection with such reality that explains why many people are religious.
That is not to say that all people are religious exclusively or even at all for
this reason. Doubtlessly, many practice religion out of fear, out of hope for
an afterlife, in search of community, or from simple inertia. It is possible,
however, even for many of these people that part of what makes them
religious is an experiential connection with some transcendental reality.
Of course, because there are no observations without interpretation, the
hypothesized transcendental signal always comes through embedded in
one or another cultural tradition, which, from a cosmic point of view, might
be considered noise.
TST seems to be the direction that Berger himself was moving in his
extra-sociological writings. It is a theory that makes sense of the historical
trajectory of liberal, mainline Protestantism, the scholarly attempt of which
has always been to better separate noise from signal and to be better open to
the possible diversity of signals out there to be received.
TST can likewise help us avoid what is called the “derogation of the lay
actor” (Giddens, 1993), the tendency to advance theories that insufficiently
credit the intelligence of lay actors. According to TST, there is something or
some things transcendentally real to which even the holders of otherwise
untenable religious beliefs are responding. The trouble is, according to the
theory, that insofar as the message received embodies both universal, transcendental signal and local, culturally interpreted human noise, the tendency
is for people to absolutize the entire message. Although, for example, some
divine reality may shine through the Bible, the Koran, or the Talmud, fundamentalist believers in these sacred books, correctly detecting in them, according to the theory, some real transcendental signal, nevertheless incorrectly
canonize the whole as if it were signal in its entirety. Because, however, TST
assumes something real and valuable to which even fundamentalist believers are responding, it does not go so far as to denigrate their cognitions as
complete illusion.
Yet one more novel feature of TST is its refusal to privilege the religious
inexperience of atheists. If it makes sense to research the extent to which
experiences deemed religious are socially constructed, it makes equal sense
to research how atheists socially construct nonreligious interpretations of the
same or kindred experiences. Herein lies a course of sociological research that
seems to have been rarely, if ever, touched.
All well and good, it might be said, but TST nonetheless is audacious in its
departure from naturalism and methodological atheism. Can such a theory
The Sociology of Religious Experience
11
even be empirically tested? In answer, as we have already observed, if TST
cannot be empirically tested then neither can social constructionism nor,
indeed, any other encompassing sociological theory of religion. The reason
is that TST must at least be refuted as an alternate hypothesis in order to
vindicate any of the other sociological theories. And if TST is to be refuted,
it must first be fairly entertained. Thus, whether it proves right or wrong,
TST needs to be considered by sociology. Doing so, returns sociology to the
biggest of questions: Why are people religious?
To be sure, there are important empirical and conceptual questions to be
asked of TST. Those questions are currently being asked, although with the
exception of a few such as Margaret Poloma and Matthew Lee, the questioners are mostly outside of sociology. Consider Ann Taves, for example, in
religious studies. Her (2009) Religious Experience Reconsidered collects most of
the questions researchers across disciplines are currently asking about something like TST (see also Poloma and Hood 2008).
As multiple disciplines are pursuing this research agenda, different
questions come from different disciplines. An important question from the
humanities, for example, reflects the turn there to language and discourse.
As David Yamane (2000) in sociology has also asked, can we researchers
access religious experience directly or is it rather only subjects’ discourse
about religious experience that we actually study? It is an important question, although the stark either/or contrast seems overdrawn. It is like asking
whether we can ever study quarks directly or just discourse about quarks.
Although radical constructionists might favor the latter view, it is then not
just religious reality that fades away.
A similarly large and much contested question is whether there are at least
some experiences that are irreducibly or sui generis religious or whether all
experiences must rather await subjects’ ascription to them of religious or
nonreligious character. Schleiermacher, Otto, and Eliade all tended toward
the former view whereas James and, more recently, Wayne Proudfood (1987)
tend toward the latter. With push back from philosophers such as Robert
Forman (2008), this debate is currently at a standoff. Sociologists might contribute their own insights.
The work being done is not just conceptual. A number of multidisciplinary
ethnographies, some including sociologists Margaret Poloma and Matthew
Lee, have been studying new paradigm or emerging church, an evangelical
but nonfundamentalist Christianity that emphasizes divine love and a direct
experience of God (Poloma and Hood 2008; Lee and Poloma 2012). In When
God Talks Back, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (2012) sets out to learn how
it is that God comes to be experienced as real for people in this movement.
Luhrmann’s findings are fascinating. Admittedly, she begins from the perspective of methodological atheism, claiming only to study the human side
12
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
of things and denying any ability to comment on objective reality itself. Her
analysis, however, moves beyond this position, framing what practitioners
do less as construction than as learning new perceptual skills and forms of
attention, a frame leaving open the possibility that some objective reality is
actually being detected and not simply projected. In the end, Luhrmann confesses to having learned herself to experience an element of what might be
considered transcendent reality.
Three other books looking with a different emphasis at this movement are
The Science and Theology of Godly Love, edited by Mathew T. Lee and Amos
Young (2012), Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church, written by Margaret Poloma and psychologist of religion Ralph W. Hood (2008),
and The Heart of Religion: Spiritual Empowerment, Benevolence, and the
Experience of God’s Love (Lee and Poloma 2012). All three works are part of
a 3-year project funded by the Templeton Foundation to research the experience and expression of Godly Love in the Pentecostal tradition. They examine
specifically how God’s love is experienced and in response practiced. The
first volume expressly advertises itself as rooted in methodological agnosticism, and the Poloma and Hood team likewise describe their research as so
guided. What distinguishes this work, particularly that of Poloma and Hood,
is its extensive examination of the causal effects of a particular kind of religious experience on social movement formation. This direction could mark a
new research agenda for sociology, one that connects with Christian Smith’s
(1996) Resisting Reagan, which similarly examined the religious roots of the
Central America Solidarity movement in the 1980s.
As can be seen, scholars in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and religion are all currently pursuing research that, if it does not quite go by the
name of TST, at least seems to move away from the stance of methodological atheism and more in the direction of methodological agnosticism. Doing
so raises questions that sociologists have heretofore tended to ignore but to
which their own expertise could ably contribute. Perhaps in doing so the
whole sociology of religion might be invigorated.
REFERENCES
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Berger, P. (1979). The heretical imperative: Contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
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Cardena, E., Lynn, S. J., & Krippner, S. (Eds.) (2004). The varieties of anomalous
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RI: Twelve.
James, W. (1961). The varieties of religious experience. New York, NY: CollierMacMillan.
Kellehear, A. (1996). Experiences near death: Beyond Medicine and Religion. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Poloma, M. (2012). The heart of religion: Spiritual empowerment, benevolence, and the experience of God’s love. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Lee, M. T., & Yong, A. (Eds.) (2012). The science and theology of Godly love. deKalb, IL:
NIU Press.
Luhrmann, T. M. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical
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Newberg, A., & D’Aquili, E. (2001). Why God won’t go away. New York, NY: Ballantine.
Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. Oxford: New York, NY.
Poloma, M. M., & Hood, R. W., Jr., (2008). Blood and fire: Godly love in a Pentecostal
emerging church. New York: New York University Press.
Porpora, D. V. (2006). Methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism, and religious experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36(1), 57–75.
Proudfood, W. (1987). Religious experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Robinson, J. A. T. (1963). Honest to God. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press.
Schleiermacher, F. (1996). On religion: Speeches to its cultured despisers. New York, NY:
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Smith, C. (1996). Resisting Reagan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Taves, A. (2009). Religious experience reconsidered: A building-block approach to the study
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Turner, V. (2008). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New Brunswick,
Canada: Aldine Transaction Press.
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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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Yamane, D. (1998). Religious experience. In W. Jr. Swatos (Ed.), The encyclopedia of
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Yamane, D. (2000). Narrative and religious experience. Sociology of Religion, 61,
171–189.
FURTHER READING
Alston, W. (1991). Perceiving God. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Bender, C. (2010). The new metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American religious
imagination. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Neitz, M., & Spickard, J. (1989). Steps toward a sociology of religious experience: The
theories of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and Alfred Schutz. Sociological Analysis, 50(2),
15–34.
Porpora, D. V. (2001). Landscapes of the soul: The Loss of moral meaning in American life.
Oxford: New York, NY.
Yamane, D., & Polzer, M. (1994). Ways of seeing ecstasy in modern society:
Experiential-expressive and cultural-linguistic Views. Sociological Analysis, 55,
1–25.
DOUGLAS PORPORA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Douglas Porpora is a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture
and Communication at Drexel University. He is an active member of NETWORK, the National Catholic Social Justice Lobby for Women Religious.
He writes mainly on social theory, but his books with similar theme include
Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Moral Meaning in American Life (2001,
Oxford University Press), Transcendence: Critical Realism and God (2004,
Routledge), and most recently, Post-Ethical Society: The Attack on Iraq, Abu
Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular (2014 University of Chicago
Press).
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