Is Religion A Human Construction?

The latest congress of the International Association for the History of Religions tries to bridge belief and biology.

The International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) held its 20th world congress at the University of Toronto earlier this month. This was no small event, since the congress, one of the oldest and most prestigious organizations for the study of religion, meets only once every five years.

The theme for the congress was “Religion: A Human Phenomenon,” a provocative title that was meant to distinguish between understanding religion as a natural or sacred aspect of human existence versus “religion” as a human construction or idea.

More than this, however, the theme indicates an increasingly popular focus in the study of religion towards evolutionary models of explanation (e.g., cognitive psychology, neurobiology, etc.). While these models are not particularly new (remember that Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859), the recent popularity of the so-called new atheists, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, is part and parcel of a growing trend in research on religion that has received much attention over the last two decades or so (and a whole lot of money!). Apparently, Richard Dawkins was invited to speak at the congress, but was unable to attend.

Of the hundreds of panels that took place over the week-long event some examples include: “Law and Religion in Pre-Modern Society,” “Islam in Ireland,” “Satanism Studies,” “Religious Communities in the Public Square,” and “Women, Religion, and Human Rights,” as well as the Explaining Religion (EXREL) project, led by Harvey Whitehouse of Oxford University. These panels combined dozens of different religious traditions and historical eras and approached “religion” in ways that are too numerous to list.

If all of this diversity seems confusing to the outsider, it is only slightly less confusing for many academics in the field. What a scholar of ancient Hinduism and a scholar of modern Jewish political philosophy have in common is not always clear at first glance. While there are some common denominators that can be pointed to, such as they way that they talk about religion (e.g., as a product of power relations between competing groups), there is not always consensus on what theories work best.

One of the aims of the Toronto congress was to build bridges between scholars of religion and scholars of evolutionary biology, like David Sloan Wilson and R. Dale Guthrie. While this is in some ways a welcome and important development in the field, many problems still remain. Because the fields of cognitive psychology and neurobiology produce results that can be applied to pharmaceutical drugs, the military, and industry, they tend to be better funded than research on gender, ethnicity, or the various ways of understanding “culture.” In our current climate of neo-liberal politics, research grants tend to follow the moneymakers, which is one reason why cognitive and neuropsychology is so popular.

That is not to say that this research is not important. The million-dollar question is how it gets used and what other valuable approaches to studying religion might fall by the wayside? Ideally a collaboration that combines the best of all theories is what produces the most effective and enduring ideas. But the question is not so simple because the politics surrounding “religion” remain heated and widely misunderstood.

On reason for this is that debates on religion in the public sphere tend to revolve around the existence of God (e.g., evolution vs. creationism) as the main battleground for the validity of ethical practices and the advocacy of certain policies, such as abortion. To put it differently, these debates draw on a wide range of particular religious beliefs and practices (e.g., the sanctity of life and the value of prayer) in order to argue for or against the ways in which society is organized (e.g., the funding of stem-cell research and prayer in schools). Bogeymen (and women) are created (Muslims, fundamentalist Christians, secularists, etc.) and are typically used as a symbol for some ultimate good or evil.

An alternative approach to “religion” that many (though not all) at the IAHR advocate is as an unstable category (unlike, say, rocks, dogs, or trees) that overlaps with such things as “culture,” “ethnicity,” “politics,” “tradition,” and so forth, where it is difficult to determine where one ends and the other begins. In this way, the question shifts from “what are we going to do about those Muslims,” to what kinds of variables (e.g., politics, class/economic issues, gender, cultural trends, media exposure, etc.) in combination with certain religious beliefs or practices cause people to come into conflict?

This shift in focus turns the conversation away from the existence of God (an old debate that will likely go on forever) towards the messy and complicated details of human relations. And while this shift makes things more complicated for public debate, it also opens up space for a broader understanding of these diverse phenomena.

If the Toronto congress can be commended for anything, it is in its attempt to get people talking across different fields, and in ways that are more productive and nuanced than the standard fare of popular public debates. Whether this will lead to more fruitful collaboration in the future or fall prey to the interests of powerful groups remains to be seen.