A study of religion that serves two masters fails in predictable fashion
Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion by Samuel L. Perry. Oxford University Press, 2024. 224 pp., $19.99 (paperback)
In the social scientific study of religion of recent years, no figure has loomed larger than sociologist Samuel Perry, best known for his pioneering work in the study of “Christian nationalism.” In Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion, Perry makes his contribution to a long tradition of prominent scholars in the field releasing single-volume summaries of their perspectives on religion as a social phenomenon. In this slim work, Perry discusses religion in the context of such contemporary concerns as political polarization, right-wing populism, and secularization. The book serves a dual purpose. First, Perry aims to provide a fresh perspective on what religion is and how it works. Second, he makes an argument for why and how the social scientific study of religion can help us make sense of our modern social and political turmoil. In each case, though the book contains real insights, they are undermined by its exaggerations and contradictions.
Perry begins with a declaration that the way we think about religion in the Western world is all wrong. We rely too heavily on a set of problematic Anglo-Protestant assumptions of religion as fundamentally about personal faith, rational affirmation of theological doctrines, and the exercise of individual agency. Such an understanding does not comport with the latest research on human social behavior. Nor is it shared by members of other cultures and religious systems, whose focus is more often on ritual, tradition, and communality. Perry proposes that our understanding of religion can be corrected by swapping out three Anglo-Protestant myths about religion with the “realities” revealed by social science.
The first and most central “myth” Perry tackles is that religion is primarily a matter of personal beliefs and faith commitments. The “reality” is that religion is more about social identities and norms—our religious beliefs are not the result of rational deliberation, but the need to establish our attachments to social groups. “What really orients our lives and activities . . . is our subjective identification with and loyalty to social groups. . . . Formal theological beliefs, by contrast, are more often the claims we make to signal our social identities, the stories we use to make sense of our circumstances.” Religion is fundamentally about “belonging, not believing.”
The second “myth” is that religions spread or shrink based on the power of their doctrines and the effectiveness of their evangelists. The “reality” is that in fact, religious growth and decline is primarily a function of mundane demographic processes such as fertility and immigration. The religious future belongs not so much to those who emphasize the teaching “Go and make disciples of all nations” but rather those who hew to an earlier commandment: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
The third “myth” Perry challenges is that when people do change their religious identities, it is because they made a rational decision to exchange one set of beliefs for another. The “reality” is that religious change is attributable to social structure. Where religious practice and identity have declined, it is due to economic, technological, and educational advancements in developed societies. These developments render the goods offered by religion (communality, material aid, a sense of existential security) superfluous. In the rare instances where religious identities are resurgent, the cause is state privileging of the majority coupled with the persecution of minority religions. Perry argues that authoritarian ethnonationalists are particularly adept at fusing ethnic, national, and religious identities to mobilize popular passions.
The first of these claims—that religion is more about “belonging, not believing”—is the most central to Perry’s account. It is also the most objectionable, but it is important to note the streams of thought in which it is grounded. First, a substantial body of psychological research indicates that many of our thoughts and actions are driven more by emotion and instinct than logic and reason, though we tend to overemphasize the latter. Second, we form our beliefs in the context of our social groups and through cognitive processes that seem more geared toward binding us to the people around us than establishing accurate perceptions about the universe. This is why we sometimes adopt seemingly absurd beliefs, hold simultaneous beliefs that contradict one another, or change our beliefs when it seems convenient. Applying these findings to the case of religion, Perry argues that the process of religious belief formation is neither rational nor truth-seeking. It is best understood as serving to strengthen attachments to our religious identity groups.
This perspective offers a real and important insight, but Perry proceeds to overstate his “belonging, not believing” thesis. It is one thing to challenge the notion that religious beliefs are formed purely through rational processes, or that once adopted, religious beliefs operate as “unmoved movers” exerting direct control over our lives. But Perry goes further than this, effectively arguing that beliefs do not do any moving at all. He writes: “Our theological ‘beliefs’ (e.g., those creeds we recite on Sunday morning or fight about on social media) are often more like a junk drawer of sayings, explanations, and interpretive viewpoints that signal membership in a group to ourselves, and more importantly, to our reference groups.” Some variant of this claim is repeated throughout the book. For Perry, it is identities all the way down.
This raises a crucial question, one Perry never addresses: In what do our religious identities and norms consist? Suppose we want to understand why it is that the Amish eschew electricity, American Orthodox Jews bear over six children per woman, and Latter-Day Saints spend part of their youth evangelizing strangers in foreign lands. Asserting the primacy of “identities and social norms” leads to the dissatisfying explanation: “Because that is who they are and what they do.” This invites the exasperated follow-up: “OK, but why is that who they are and what they do?” And it will be very difficult to answer this latter question without reference to their beliefs about what God wants from them, as communicated by religious leaders, traditions, or sacred texts. Without recognizing the power of beliefs, our understanding of cultural, behavioral, or other religious differences cannot proceed very far.
Had Perry merely proposed an emphasis shift, arguing we should take greater account of social identities, demographic processes, and social structure, he would have been on strong ground. By overcorrecting with bold, debunking declarations, he provides an account of religion that is inadequate to explain a wide range of religious phenomena. Readers may nonetheless find value in his alternative perspective, as well as much of the discussion on religious research and trends.
The second, shorter section of Religion for Realists turns to Perry’s thoughts on the state of the scientific study of religion. This is where things go deeply awry. It is noteworthy that despite the book’s subtitle, Perry never makes a case for religion as a subject worthy of study in its own right. The reason to study religion, rather, is that this will help us combat the political right more effectively: “I believe the scientific study of religion reveals [the authoritarian ethnonationalists’] game plan. . . . [A]cademics like me . . . have something of a missional obligation to inform the world.”
Perry laments the marginalization of the scientific study of religion. Budding scholars interested in religion are frequently warned away from the topic for fear that they will never find a job. Surveys of social scientists reveal that many of them view religion as an irrelevant subject. More troubling, evidence suggests they engage in discrimination against scholars known or suspected of being personally religious, because of concerns that they may be less scientifically rigorous, or worse still—conservative. Perry declares this bias an “outrage” and calls for more favorable treatment of religious scholars and religion research. To all of which I say: Hear, hear.
Yet this plea for greater openness among social scientists is marred by two serious problems. The first is that Perry has not made a positive case for the value of studying religion. He claims that religious identities are becoming indistinguishable from other kinds of identities (national, ethnic, political), that religion is increasingly superfluous in modern societies, that religious beliefs are mostly just talk, and that the most effective proponents of modern religion are right-wing authoritarians. For any secular readers inclined to believe religion is a pernicious but (thankfully) marginal phenomenon, there is nothing in the book to challenge their perception. Why, then, would we expect them to revisit their negative evaluations of religion scholarship, or for that matter, of religious people?
Further, Perry’s commitment to greater openness to religion in the social sciences has limits. He notes: “I would not encourage hiring social scientists who subscribe to theories . . . that certain segments of the population should be denied rights to marriage, child adoption, healthcare, or any other civil right on the basis of some presumed harm to civilization.” One need not read too deeply between the lines to perceive the reference to religiously conservative views on marriage, gender, sexuality, and abortion. In light of this transparent bit of boundary work, the outrage over exclusion and calls for openness from a few pages earlier ring hollow.
In the final chapter, Perry turns toward the topic of how religion scholars should engage with the public. Academics, he warns, have a trust problem among the religious population. “If social scientists tend to hold negative prejudices toward religious or conservative Americans, and evidence suggests many do, why would the latter trust much of what the former has to say about issues of importance to them?” If there is to be trust, it must be earned via a sincere commitment to scientific principles. “[Religious and conservative Americans] should not be under any impression that our research findings are the result of our deliberate efforts to gain evidence that would allow us to oppose their group. They should not think we draw our conclusions first, then find supporting data.” Once again: Hear, hear.
Yet while I enthusiastically endorse the message, it is difficult to imagine a more ill-fitting messenger. In his many public and academic writings (as well as interviews, speaking engagements, social media posts, etc.) on “Christian nationalism,” Perry has been as tireless an antagonist of religious and conservative Americans as one is likely to encounter. As I and others have argued at length, “Christian nationalism” is an extremely flimsy social scientific concept, relying on tortured and partisan interpretations of survey data to provide academic legitimation to popular prejudices casting religious conservatives as racist authoritarians. In this book as well, Perry has proclaimed a “missional obligation” to use the scientific study of religion to oppose the political right and advocated for discrimination against religious conservatives in social science. His endorsement of the fair-minded application of scientific principles in the service of earning the trust of religious conservatives is, to put it mildly, difficult to reconcile.
These staggering contradictions reveal an approach to the social scientific study of religion that seeks to serve two incompatible masters—that of scientific objectivity on the one hand, and partisan warfare on the other. A scholarly enterprise hobbled by such tensions will not be capable either of producing sound scientific insights or earning public trust.
Given Perry’s prominent status in the social scientific study of religion, it is not unreasonable to take Religion for Realists as an indicator of the state of the field. What it reveals is troubling: an approach to studying religion with a high tolerance for theoretical incoherence that fails to articulate the relevance of its subject, that cannot tell the difference between analyzing culture wars and fighting them, and that refuses to face its own biases and the grave harm they inflict on scientific integrity and public trust. As a social scientist of religion myself, I naturally share Perry’s desire for a rise in the professional status of our subdiscipline. But a field that cannot recognize and confront these contradictions frankly deserves to be marginalized.
Jesse Smith is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Benedictine College. His research is focused on the intersection of family, religion, and politics in the modern United States.
Image: Mosaic at the crypt for Louis Pasteur, Paris, c. 1895, Wikimedia
