What Really Matters

In his 1985 study of popular religious expression in early 20^th century Italian Harlem, Robert Orsi observed that Italian Americans made a distinction between "religion" and "church," with religion referring to "what really matters" in their lives.¹ I welcome this new book, because Orsi compellingly demonstrates why all scholars of religion ought to examine carefully our implicit assumptions about what is "religion" and to refocus on "what really matters" in the practice and experience of the people whose religions we purport to understand.

I hope that sociologists of religion, in particular, will consider Robert Orsi's critical challenge, because our field has been blind to "what really matters" in people's religious lives. Especially in the United States, sociology has too narrowly focused on religious organizations and groups (researching, for example, membership and participation rates), assuming that church affiliation somehow represents the "religion" of persons involved in that organization. When sociology has considered the religions of individuals, our discipline has typically focused on individual participation in those religious organizations and their activities, as well as measures of individual affirmation or non-affirmation beliefs of church-prescribed beliefs and values. Orsi amply demonstrates the seriousness of the mistakes we make when we over-emphasize "belief" as the core of religion. If we want to study "what really matters" in people's religious lives, scholars of religion need a whole different understanding of what we call "religion."

Robert Orsi applies a critical historical perspective to the social construction of knowledge and thought produced by our scholarly disciplines studying religion. He argues that both our methodologies and our theories are deeply influenced by modernist assumptions, inherited from our 18^th and 19^th century scholarly progenitors, such that researchers cannot recognize many people's religious expressions as "religion." This modernist bias results, not only in the failure to comprehend people's religions, but also in the uncritical use of moralizing dichotomous conceptual distinctions, embedded in our very definitions of religion and religiosity. Orsi asserts, "The mother of all religious dichotomies—us/them—has regularly been constituted as a moral distinction—good/bad religion" (183). When scholars researching religion uncritically accept such dichotomies and the definitional boundaries they substantiate, not only do we fail to comprehend people's religions, but also we contribute to the prejudices and antagonisms used to justify both subtle and overt violence toward the religious Other.

Historians can offer a valuable corrective perspective, reminding scholars who study religion that conceptual categories (e.g., sacred vs. profane, religion vs. magic) are themselves the result of long periods of contestation, the results of which have been profoundly shaped by power and domination. Anthropologists, likewise, expose the narrow, Western cultural presuppositions embedded in our scholarly concepts.² In my opinion, it is difficult to distinguish the modernist bias (amply unmasked by Orsi) in our scholarly concepts from the protestant bias, especially in the conceptual framework of the sociology of religion. By "protestant" I mean constellation of ideas that gained currency in the Reformation era, influencing Catholic, as well as Protestant, notions of religious belonging and the boundaries delineating acceptable/unacceptable belief and practice. A good example is the notion that people as individuals (rather than as families or tribes) make voluntary choices of their religious "belief-system" (understood as a coherent creedal package, promulgated by a specific religious organization). Another example is the concept of religious commitment as bonds with an identifiable religious group whose members are religiously qualified individuals, as judged by "right" moral standards and "correct" beliefs.

Historically "Protestant," such ideas are now embedded in many scholars' conceptual frameworks.³ We need to expose such biases in our conceptual tools and find ways to move beyond the narrow image of religion to which they have constricted us. These ideas are, themselves, social products of a long period of conflict and contestation—between and among Catholics and Protestants alike—that some historians call the "long Reformation," roughly 1300 to 1700 CE. Historian Edward Muir has argued that this "long Reformation" resulted in an enormous shift in perspective in Western Christianity: previously, the boundaries of encouraged (as well as minimally acceptable...