Samuel Perry, Religion for Realists

In my career one of the most formative books I read was by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. It was stunning in both is freshness (to me; I read it about 25 years after publication) and its impact. Ever since I have been attuned, not an expert though, to sociology and social scientific studies. Reading on these themes are a hobby.

Which is why Samuel Perry’s newest book, Religion for Realists, grabbed my attention when I saw it advertised. It’s subtitle tosses some shade in two directions: Why We All Need [he means both religion folks and professional sociologists, academies] the Scientific Study of Religion, which of course means we need to look at the evidence.

This book argues that we -- by which mean mainly Anglophone Westerners -- often misunderstand much about how religion functions. We are steeped in the ambient folk theology of our dominant Anglo-Protestant culture, which is itself sustained by tradition, pastors, pollsters, pop culture, and yes, even we academics at times. Consequently, when we think about ‘religion’ we tend to think about individual belief, doctrines, and the transformative power of individual religious people. On the contrary, religion’s importance and power lie more in the deep culture of social norms and identity, the imperatives of population, and the ‘rules and resources’ of social structure.

Instead of thinking of doctrines (and theology), worldviews, individualistic senses of agency, etc., he says, “I also want you to start thinking more in terms of unconscious bias and group loyalties than self-conscious beliefs; more about fertility rates, cohorts, and immigration than doctrines; and at least as much about social structures as about human agency.”

These are Perry’s big ideas.

What happens when we begin to think about religion with these deeper or larger or wider patterns of thinking? I remember studying conversion theory some two decades ago when I learned that conversion is what a group says it is. I thought, Hmmmm, that’s interesting. Well, it’s more than interesting. It is reality. Christian nationalism, which is everywhere in the news that I read these days, cannot be reduced to a set of beliefs. It is Groupthink and the ideas legitimate the group. Countering its ideas does not impact the group. It might impact isolated, persuadable individuals.

Perry thinks of American religion as Anglo-Protestant, and that what most mean by religion today is actually something analogous to Anglo-Protestantism. The two essentials are (1) that personal faith drives religious behavior and (2) that individual actors master the direction of life. “Yet dominant Anglo-Protestant assumptions about what motivates human beings (faith), what directs the futures of religious communities and broader societies (ideas or doctrines, often found in sacred texts), and the emphasis they place on individual agency are largely wrong. Not biblically or morally wrong…. But they are empirically wrong.” Again, he comes to the driving ideas of this book:

Instead, I'll argue the scientific study of religion helps us understand that humans are in greater part driven by the more fundamentally cognitive ‘deep culture’ of social norms, identities, and loyalties; societies are transformed less by moral ideas or doctrines than by discernible transitions in human populations; and our agency, to an extent that we may resent recognizing, is powerfully shaped by social structure -- the layers of laws, policies, formal roles, material resources, and institutions in which we live our lives.

Hence, “We need a religion for realists.” Not by creating a new secular religion, but by comprehending the complexity of the Anglo-Protestant American sense of religion/s.

What is religion? “The scientific study of religion is the systematic, evidence- based approach to understanding these subjective and objective realities of religion with an eye toward expanding practical knowledge for humankind.”

He sketches three deep themes to his approach:

The domain of cognitive force according to the Anglo-Protestant tradition is about beliefs and personal faith, but the reality is about social identity and norms. The domain of the growth factor in the Anglo-Protestant tradition is about ideas and doctrines but the reality is about population dynamics. And the change agent according to the Anglo-Protestant tradition is individuals and obedience but the reality is a deep influence by social structures.

Here we go:

What really orients our lives and activities, and something I'll argue is more to the core of religion itself, is our subjective identification with and loyalty to social groups. Social identities, representing something far more cognitive and primal than our theological beliefs, are more often what drive the ship. 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, and the justifications we cite to explain our behavior to others.” So we can say that if we claim our identity in a group, we can also know what ideas will be used to legitimate that group. Furthermore, “Religious growth and decline have always been more about the causes and consequences of population change than whatever theological ideas are being propagated.

Join me in reading this important new book.