Religion and the Social Sciences: Conflict or Reconciliation?

Abstract

I offer an account of Weston La Barre's The Ghost Dance to indicate the continuing vitality of a Freudian ideological attack on religious beliefs and behavior. A contemporary group of social scientists, chiefly featuring Bellah, Geertz,and Luckmann, could possibly meet La Barre's sociopsychiatric challenge to religion. I examine their reliance on functional definitions of religion as a conciliatory measure designed to overcome the conflict between religious belief and the social scientific study of religion. Despite certain logical and empirical problems in the use of functional definitions of religion, I conclude that theoretical advances have been achieved in their writings. But in a more philosophical context, which is where La Barre's analysis really belongs, I suggest that their positions are logically insufficient as a rejoinder. The bridge between religion and social science, therefore, may yet contain some shaky girders. V ERY little out-and-out hostility toward religious claims and behavior is found nowadays in the works of social scientific observers of religion. Most anthropological, sociological, and psychological analyses of the religious aspects of human life are either staunchly neutral as regards the value or truth in religion, or decidedly conciliatory. An influential group of contemporary social scientists, some of whom fall into a category Roland Robertson calls Sociotheologians (1971: 309), is indeed conciliatory, self-consciously and for compelling theoretical reasons. But those of us who are interested in the vagaries of how social scientific investigation relates to religion go astray if we, overly sanguine, neglect the old but not yet tired antagonisms. We all know that much of the social scientific study of religion is rooted in a basically antireligious tradition. To be sure, authors such as Durkheim may have insisted on the necessity of a religious system for the adequate functioning of a society and even for its very being, but most earlier interpreters of religion have explicitly rejected for themselves the notion that any particular religion's claims about reality could in fact be true. Representatives such as Tylor and Spencer of an intellectualist approach to religion were convinced philosophical naturalists. For them, not practices, but beliefs about a nonempirical or supernatural world constituted the real essence of religion. Modern man, they believed, could now know that no religious beliefs were true, and so religion ought to have little utility in enlightened people's lives. If a religion is not true in any cognitive sense, then to traffic with it in one's personal life is virtually immoral.