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

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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