Month: January 2009

Thoughts on the Sociology of Religion

I have a stu­dent tak­ing a soci­ol­o­gy of reli­gion course right now, and she asked me for some advice on how to inte­grate what she’s learn­ing in class with her faith.

I thought this might be of inter­est to more stu­dents than just her, so here’s what I had to say (slight­ly mod­i­fied from the email):

We need to meet face-to-face to talk this through, but I have some ini­tial thoughts for you:

1) Many times we con­fuse descrip­tion with expla­na­tion. To explain how some­thing works is not to explain why it is. Clear­ly every­thing must work some way, and so inter­est­ing descrip­tions of every­thing ought to abound — I should be able to describe think­ing, love, humor, and grav­i­ty. But that does not mean that I have under­stood the things I am describ­ing inter­est­ing aspects of. For instance, I can describe the physics of golf in great detail, and then anoth­er schol­ar can come along and describe the rules of golf in great detail, and then a third schol­ar can come along and describe the his­to­ry of golf in great detail. All of these descrip­tions may be accu­rate, but none of these descrip­tions will explain why I play golf. And none will cap­ture what it feels like to play golf. And like­ly none of them, if writ­ten for a schol­ar­ly audi­ence, will be of the slight­est use to golfers desir­ing to hone their craft. Remem­ber that there is a soci­ol­o­gy of mar­riage, but should you become mar­ried one day you will dis­cov­er that there is a lev­el of real­i­ty that the soci­o­log­i­cal descrip­tions nev­er ade­quate­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed.

2) If you assume there is no God at the begin­ning of your analy­sis then your analy­sis will not per­suade me that there is no God, for how could it con­clude any­thing else? It reminds me of a sto­ry Fran­cis Collins told us last year: “A marine biol­o­gist casts a net into the low­est part of the ocean, brings up the catch, and ana­lyzes it. He makes an amaz­ing dis­cov­ery: there is no crea­ture at the bot­tom of the sea less than two inch­es in diam­e­ter! The prob­lem, of course, is that his net has two inch holes. It is inca­pable of dis­cov­er­ing any­thing small­er than its mesh.” In the same way, a method­ol­o­gy that rules out the super­nat­ur­al from the begin­ning will nev­er dis­cov­er evi­dence of the super­nat­ur­al. This should not be sur­pris­ing at all.

3) There are some faith-friend­ly soci­ol­o­gists out there. Three worth
inves­ti­gat­ing are Rod­ney Stark free fear house

sea of love dvd , Bradley Wright, and Chris­t­ian Smith. Read some of their writ­ings, par­tic­u­lar­ly Stark’s. You can find him in the library. Maybe even email one of them and explain that you’re an under­grad and you have some ques­tions about how to relate soci­ol­o­gy to your faith (do not be offend­ed if they do not reply — they are busy peo­ple). Also, check out some of the books at http://www.heartsandmindsbooks.com/vocation/sociology/

Hope that’s use­ful to some of you. Much of it applies to the social sci­ences in gen­er­al. lam­ic­tal orange starter watch bar­bie mer­maid­ia online mak­ing waves divx movie online

How Can There Be Only One Way?

I was recent­ly think­ing about 1st Tim­o­thy 2:5–6: “For there is one God and one inter­me­di­ary between God and human­i­ty, Christ Jesus, him­self human, who gave him­self as a ran­som for all, reveal­ing God’s pur­pose at his appoint­ed time.” (New Eng­lish Trans­la­tion)

These vers­es high­light the aspect of Chris­tian­i­ty that both­ers West­ern­ers most: its exclu­siv­i­ty. The notion that Jesus is the only way to God vex­es many peo­ple.

This morn­ing a thought occurred to me: almost every­one who believes in God believes that there’s only one way. Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize it.

For most peo­ple I know, their “one way” is being nice. Unless you are nice/­good/s­in­cere/al­tru­is­tic/em­pa­thet­ic/en­light­ened/ad­jec­tive-of-choice enough, you fail.

The way of nice­ness is no less lim­it­ing than the way of faith in Christ: it excludes peo­ple just as sure­ly and it is far more arbi­trary.

This is coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple, so allow me to explain.

It is exclu­sive in that some peo­ple just aren’t nice enough. More on that lat­er.

It is arbi­trary in that the dev­il is in the details. How do you know if you’ve been nice enough? And what con­sti­tutes the right kind of nice­ness, any­way? After all, there’s no real rea­son to sup­pose that an infi­nite­ly smart Being would mea­sure nice­ness in the way that makes the most sense to you.

The Chris­t­ian prin­ci­ple of exclu­siv­i­ty makes more sense, for it flows from the sim­ple belief that Jesus is God in the flesh.

Think­ing about this for a sec­ond should make the rea­son­ing clear.

If you believe that Jesus is God, then to say you can come to God apart from Jesus is as non­sen­si­cal as say­ing you can go to Los Ange­les with­out going to Cal­i­for­nia.

In oth­er words, all that Chris­tians are insist­ing is that you can’t come to God with­out com­ing to God. This hard­ly seems con­tro­ver­sial. You may reject the premis­es of the argu­ment (that God exists or that Jesus is God), but grant­ed those two the belief can’t be cat­e­go­rized as extreme or bizarre. It’s just con­sis­tent.

The real prob­lem most peo­ple seem to have isn’t that Chris­tian­i­ty is exclu­sive. Their real prob­lem is that Chris­tian­i­ty appears to be unfair­ly exclu­sive. This is most often expressed as fol­lows, “What about those who have nev­er heard of Christ? How can God exclude them sim­ply because they haven’t heard of Jesus?”

There are actu­al­ly some very rea­son­able answers to those ques­tions. Here’s one, here’s anoth­er

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, and here’s yet a third. There are more where those came from — if this ques­tion dis­tress­es you then dig into it. You won’t agree with every­thing you read. I cer­tain­ly don’t agree with every argu­ment in three arti­cles I linked. Fig­ure out what you believe for your­self.

But here’s the impor­tant thing to real­ize: the same prob­lem con­fronts the nice­ness stan­dard. What about those born in the wrong time or the wrong place? Some of your ances­tors owned slaves in accor­dance with the cus­toms of their cul­ture (this is true regard­less of your eth­nic­i­ty) — did they fail a test they did­n’t know they were tak­ing?

Some of them like­ly burned cats to death for fun. Do they fail the nice­ness test mere­ly because they were born in the wrong time or in the wrong place?

For that mat­ter, what of you? Who knows which of our actions our grand­chil­dren will deem immoral? Per­haps you have been born in the wrong time and place to achieve a rea­son­able stan­dard of nice­ness.

You might object that we should judge peo­ple rel­a­tive to the stan­dards of their own cul­ture, so we don’t need to wor­ry about what stan­dards our grand­chil­dren will hold us up against. Per­haps. Believ­ing that would require you to stop judg­ing dic­ta­tor­ships, sweat­shops, mod­ern-day slave traf­fick­ing, and racism in oth­er cul­tures. Also, you will need to let the Church off the hook for things like the Cru­sades and the Inqui­si­tion. This is just one the prob­lems that emerges from the notion that moral stan­dards are com­plete­ly rel­a­tive to cul­ture or per­son­al­i­ty. There are sev­er­al detailed cri­tiques avail­able: here’s one

, here’s anoth­er, and here is a third (that last one is a pdf writ­ten by Car­di­nal Ratzinger before he became Pope).

So if your main beef with Chris­tian­i­ty is that it’s exclu­sive, exam­ine your own beliefs care­ful­ly. You might be sur­prised to dis­cov­er just how exclu­sion­ary they turn out to be.

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