19.4 A more critical view

Once we have established the facts, spotted correlations and made sure we understood things from the adherents' point of view, is there anything left to do? Yes, there is. We can now take a more critical view.

At this stage, you may be feeling confused. Did we not just tell you to respect the religious beliefs of adherents? Yes we did. But that was for a specific reason. If we do not make that effort, we are likely to accept or reject things based on purely emotional factors. Suppose you are researching a group that practices polygamy. One man. many wives. You may personally find the idea repugnant. But you still need to make the effort to understand that to these people, polygamy was commanded by God, and your feelings of disgust are not going to change their minds on the matter. You need to know what is going on in their heads before you can do anything with the data. Then you can critique that religion, calmly and without excessive emotion.

The critical approach, if we use the same example, goes something like this: "Let's suppose that polygamy was not, in fact commanded by God. Let's ask instead what social, psychological, historical or even physical factors could have caused this behaviour?" Critical scholarship emphasises theory over data. It tends towards functional rather than substantive understandings of religion, whereas phenomenology goes the opposite way.

But one would normally not just start off by criticizing religion randomly. You could do that, but your efforts would largely be wasted. It is more useful to critique religion from a specific existing theoretical perspective. This is like having a set of differently coloured sunglasses. If you wear the blue sunglasses, the whole world appears in shades of blue. If you take them off and put on a green-tinted pair of sunglasses, suddenly everything looks green! But the world did not change - only the way we looked at it. In the same way, if you use, for example, feminist theory to look at a problem, everything about that problem will look like it is gender-related, and there is nothing wrong with that. But now step out of that and use a theoretical lens that focuses on race, or class, and everything looks quite different.

Of course, every existing theoretical approach was created by somebody. It is possible to invent one's own theory of religion and use that as a lens to look at a phenomenon. We give out an award for that sort of thing: it's called a PhD in Religion Studies! Until then, let's look at some existing "lenses" one can use.

Class

But you do not need to be a Marxist to recognise that there are different classes in society and that they react different to the message of religion. I once noted a pattern. It seemed that post-medieval Christianity and Buddhism were both able to spread into new territories, but they did so in different ways. Christianity spread from below, by mission work among the poorer classes of society. Buddhism invariably grabbed the middle classes first. Trying to explain this pattern got me my PhD.