Thinking About Religion: An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion, and: Thinking about Religion: A Reader (review)

One could do a lot worse with one’s scholarly time than spend several days immersed in Ivan Strenski’s Thinking About Religion. Aimed at an introductory course in the study of religion, Strenski’s two volumes—An Historical Introduction to Theories of Religion and A Reader—provide engaging commentary for anyone in the field who would like a quick refresher on the epic modern European conversations on nature, gods, Bibles, and primitives; on Semites and Indo-Europeans, totems, and taboos; on Bronislaw Malinowski’s critique of James Frazer, Robertson Smith’s commitment to ethnography, and the historical and phenomenological influences at work in the writings of Max Weber. Both volumes revolve around the motif of “thinking about religion,” the effort, namely, to discern how human beings have “made religion an area of curiosity by submitting [it] to endless interrogation, understanding, and explanation” (Introduction 1). Thinking about religion is thinking through the set of problems this term has signified in modern Western history: “What, for example, was the first religion? How many religions are there? Are all religions equally true, or is there only one?” “Do religions change? If so, do they change according to any kind of regular principle, such as evolution or degeneration?” (Introduction 1–3). As Strenski observes, these questions were “rigorously interrogated and systematically researched” only fairly recently in “the history of the West” (Introduction 1). His volumes, then, present “the ‘story’ of important attempts to raise and solve many of the chief problems of religion by inventing what we can call ‘theories’ of religion” (Introduction 1–2).

Beginning with early modern efforts to identify a natural religion shared by all peoples (Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Bodin, Hume) and the development of critical, historical approaches to the Bible (Spinoza, Renan, Strauss), the books trace the dynamic emergence of comparative mythology and religion, anthropology, evolutionary ethnography, and phenomenology, moving from debates about primitives, languages, and myths among nineteenth and turn of the century figures such as Max Müller, Edward Burnett Tylor, William Robertson Smith, and Frazer to reflections on the nature of religious experience in Rudolph Otto, the relationship of religion and economy in Max Weber, the complexities of mind, desire, and civilization in Sigmund Freud, and the social and psychical structures of the sacred in Émile Durkheim, Malinowski, and Mircea Eliade. It is an absorbing story and Strenski an able editor and lively narrator who gives vivid readings of these figures in their historical worlds.

How would these volumes serve an introductory course? Let me evaluate them individually on this score, beginning with the Reader.

The first thing to say about Thinking About Religion: A Reader is that Strenski, who has written books on Durkheim, on myth in twentieth-century history, and on sacrifice, and who is an energetic participant in contemporary theoretical debates in the study of religion, is to be commended for stimulating discussion about the introductory course. For every teacher of such a course has doubtless experienced the desire for the perfect Reader, one that would satisfy the responsibility to teach a wide array of theories, be sensitive to historical change, throw the odd wrench in students’ confidence about the object in question, and introduce them to a way of thinking analytically, critically, historically, and self-consciously that is germane across the human sciences. Strenski’s volume accomplishes these aims competently: it gives short, representative selections organized historically to bring out continuities, innovations, and debates, and it evidences an appreciation for the powers of the editor, utilizing classic readings from classic thinkers alongside more obscure selections from these same authors (e.g., “Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1942 memoir on the occasion of Malinowski’s sudden death” or “James Frazer’s obituary of Robertson Smith” [Reader x]), and selections from authors both distant and contemporary writing about these...