Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology – On the Multidimensional Foundations of Meaning in Social Life
- Introduction: Interpretive Approaches in the Study of Religion
- 1 Making Sense of Queer Christian Lives
- 2 The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Religion, Spirituality, and Ritual among Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors
- 3 Doing It: Ethnography, Embodiment, and the Interpretation of Religion
- 4 Mind the Gap: What Ethnographic Silences Can Teach Us
- 5 The Public Sphere and Presentations of the Collective Self: Being Shia in Modern India
- 6 The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion
- 7 The Religion of White Male Ethnonationalism in a Multicultural Reality
- 8 Totalitarianism as Religion
- 9 The Heritage Spectrum: A More Inclusive Typology for the Age of Global Buddhism
- 10 Interpreting Nonreligion
- Afterword: Approaching Religions – Some Reflections on Meaning, Identity, and Power
- Index
6 - The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Series Editors’ Preface: Interpretive Lenses in Sociology – On the Multidimensional Foundations of Meaning in Social Life
- Introduction: Interpretive Approaches in the Study of Religion
- 1 Making Sense of Queer Christian Lives
- 2 The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Religion, Spirituality, and Ritual among Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors
- 3 Doing It: Ethnography, Embodiment, and the Interpretation of Religion
- 4 Mind the Gap: What Ethnographic Silences Can Teach Us
- 5 The Public Sphere and Presentations of the Collective Self: Being Shia in Modern India
- 6 The Power of Meaning: Toward a Critical Discursive Sociology of Religion
- 7 The Religion of White Male Ethnonationalism in a Multicultural Reality
- 8 Totalitarianism as Religion
- 9 The Heritage Spectrum: A More Inclusive Typology for the Age of Global Buddhism
- 10 Interpreting Nonreligion
- Afterword: Approaching Religions – Some Reflections on Meaning, Identity, and Power
- Index
Summary
Peter L. Berger, the now-departed prickly doyen of the sociology of religion, was characteristically upfront when discussing the debates over different definitions of religion: “I must confess that I find this question sublimely uninteresting” (Berger, 2014: p. 17). On the one hand, I heartily agree. There is no shortage of academic work that takes a definition of religion and uses it as a template for assessing whether something counts as “religion.” Lužný (2020), for example, argues that Czech Jediism and the Czech Church of Beer do not count as religions using a choice of (mostly functional) definitions. While he makes the valuable point that academic definitions may function to legitimate state decisions, it is less clear how the attempt to fit a religious group into a definitional box contributes to knowledge. Finding yet another case study to challenge a familiar definition is not a sign of sociological imagination, but rather of misunderstanding the function of definition. Consequently, it is only a small step to the other prevalent practice in the field, namely the infinite loop of metatheoretical discussion over the scholarly uses of “religion” (Saler, 1993; McCutcheon, 1997). Indeed, an expanded definition of religion is what Lužný recommends as a way out of the problem of accounting for “invented religions” like Jediism and the Church of Beer. Why I find both endeavors, with Berger, “sublimely uninteresting,” is simple: While we need working definitions of religion for many types of research, these definitions are – and should be – given as pragmatic ways to demarcate the field of vision rather than more or less accurate depictions of reality. The question, then, is not about truthfulness, but usefulness.
However, on the other hand, definitions are the most interesting question in the sociology of religion – just not in the way the field has traditionally considered it. To give you an example: my PhD student Helmi Halonen analyzes the ways in which the Finnish immigration authority (Migri) decides whether an asylum seeker's conversion to Christianity is genuine enough to warrant asylum based on religious discrimination in the country of origin. These can be literally life and death decisions.
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- Interpreting ReligionMaking Sense of Religious Lives, pp. 131 - 150Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2022