Religion: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters. By Christian Smith

All attempts to construct a general definition of “religion,” valid for all times and places, have proved unsatisfactory so far. Christian Smith’s Religion offers the best theoretical-analytical definition I know, even if at the end it also proves not fully satisfactory and is certainly not sufficient to ground a general “theory” of religion. The definition forms the core and the most systematic and persuasive contribution of this theoretically ambitious book. It builds upon the analysis developed by Martin Riesebrodt in The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (2010), but it improves significantly upon Riesebrodt’s Weberian analysis.

Smith’s definition is lengthy, complex in its multiple interrelated components, and convincingly comprehensive, in that it includes religion’s essential elements, while excluding accidental ones. Religion is defined first as “a complex of culturally prescribed practices” (p. 22). It rightly foregrounds “practices” over beliefs and cognitive systems. The second component in the definition, “based on premises about the existence and nature of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal” (p. 22) is the pivotal one and Smith’s most original and relevant contribution. The third component points to the aim and raison d’être of all religions, “which seek to help practitioners gain access to and communicate or align themselves with those powers” (p. 22). The final component in the definition points to the human purpose of religion, namely, “in hopes of realizing human goods and avoiding things bad, especially avoiding misfortune and receiving blessings and deliverance from crises” (p. 36). Smith’s conception of “human goods” is grounded in Aristotelian “eudaemonian teleology” and in moral and philosophical personalism, a position he has developed in previous works.

The definitional chapter “What Is Religion?” constitutes a real tour de force. Smith grounds his approach in the philosophy of critical ontological realism, which assumes that religion is a real entity. Post-colonial critics may be right that the concept of religion itself only emerged first in Europe in the early modern era. For Smith, “this does not negate the fact that humans have been practicing something real and identifiable that we call religion for countless millennia” (p. 16). Yet, Smith recognizes that the word “religion” (singular), as used in the definition, exists only as an analytical, theoretical concept, which refers abstractly to the class of all religions as particular instances of religious practices. In actuality, all that exists are particular “religions” (plural), which Smith views as concrete “instances of the abstract theoretical concept” (p. 46).

I only have a minor reservation concerning the definition. Notwithstanding Smith’s insistence on the “institutionalized meanings and purposes of the cultures and traditions that prescribe religious practices” (p. 68), due to his personalist assumptions, the “practitioners” in the definition seem to refer primarily, as is evident from the various illustrations about “the human goods” of religious concern, to human persons rather than to social collectivities.

Such an assumption overlooks “primitive” religion or even all pre-historical religions before the Axial Age, which emphasize that the goods pursued or hoped for are those of the collectivity not those of individuals. Durkheim built his theory of the socially sacred upon such an assumption. Even Max Weber, who clearly belonged to the opposite individualist camp, introduced the crucial distinction between “the primeval cult” and “the religious community” as two radically different types of religion. The primeval cult and the cult of all political associations (tribe, city, empire) left the individual interests out of consideration and took care only of interests that concerned the collectivity as a whole. Religious communities, by contrast, were independent of all ethnic associations, promising salvation to the individual qua individual, as well as deliverance from sickness and all kinds of individual misfortune. Those are the religious communities that Smith appears to have in mind in his theory of religion. Yet, it is well known that such religious communities emerged relatively late in human history, in fact, only in the aftermath of the Axial Age.

This raises the more fundamental question of the absence of any kind of historical analysis or of any kind of theoretical-analytical conceptualization of the historical dynamics and processes of religious change in Smith’s theory of religion. The strength of his analysis rests on its focus on social ontology. Chapter 4, “Why Are Humans Religious?” particularly the section “On the Naturalness of Religion,” serves as persuasive evidence. But the other sections of the book that occupy themselves not with the analysis of what religion is, but with what religion can do, which requires the empirical analysis of actual religions, are less persuasive.

While I agree with Smith that “it is impossible to do good social science while bracketing ontology and sidelining causality” (p. 8), one could add that it is impossible to do good social science if one ignores the historicity of all religions.

It is also questionable whether one can develop a persuasive theory of religion while theorizing only about the already differentiated religious field, without taking into account the historically changing dynamic relations between religious institutions and other social institutions. In the context of this review, one cannot but think, in the changing relations between church and state, which form such a constitutive component, not just a secondary product, of the historical development of Christian religion.