What is Theory?

Believing and Acting (2012) is equally erudite and witty. Known for his good humor, Davis uses wit to make the medicine he dispenses go down more easily. For the patient—that is, scholars engaged in the study of religion who are concerned about proper “methods and approaches”—the prognosis is rather good. But Davis’s wit, I suspect, may also encourage us to move too quickly past some of the claims that he makes. I wish to explore one such claim, namely, his assertion that the study of religion does not need theory. I consider myself a critical theorist of religion, so my engagement with Davis’s argument is not merely business, it’s personal. Though heartfelt, I should hope that the last sentence is taken with a grain of humor. To preview my argument, I shall offer a negative assessment of Davis’s claim about the utility of theory in the study of religion.

Before exploring this point of disagreement, let me say why Believing and Acting is such a good book, the reading of which is time well spent. Davis is a new style comparativist whose enterprise is not burdened by the essentialist ambitions and the rank-ordering of traditions that characterize older models. He has a light touch that envelops a seriousness of purpose, a verve that makes for easy reading. He moves easily from a discussion of Peirce’s anti-Cartesian epistemology and antiskeptical conception of truth to the implications of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism for the study of religion. Davis is impressed by Rorty’s critique of twentieth-century philosophical empiricism and by the contributions of pragmatists such Wayne Proudfoot, despite Proudfoot’s misreading of Rorty as hostile to scientific inquiry and the Peircean notion of truth. From this critique, Davis distills three points that scholars can apply to those with ambitions of providing a grand theory of religion: first, scientistic foundationalism is incoherent; second, norms and descriptions are fluid; and third, historical predictability is limited by duration and scope (2012, 96). Armed with these insights, the student of religion is less likely to make the kind of errors that too often bedevil those with grand theoretical ambitions.

By the end of Davis’s itinerary, the reader has been treated to comparative analyses of methods and approaches to the study of religion, ethics, and art. This is all good stuff, which grabs the reader’s attention and focuses his or her thought. But Davis is at his best in chapter 5, which assesses the current vogue for cognitive studies of religion, and in chapter 8, where he provides a comparative analysis of the ethics of abortion and the use of prenatal stem cells for research and therapy. Davis shows why cognitive approaches to the study of religion are not especially promising, why their explanatory ambitions vastly exceed the likely results. He identifies a number of problems with this approach, such as conflating metaphors with biological processes, causal relations with intentionality, and abstract languages with the quotidian, hurly burly, and idiosyncratic nature (the idiolects) of actual languages. These practices underwrite the search for a cognitive infrastructure that explains universalities in religious practices, beliefs, and experiences. The proponents of the cognitive approach want to identify this repertory. Davis is deeply skeptical. If there is a “universal religious repertoire,” it is likely to be highly abstract and vague—trivial in terms of explanatory import. Now high-level abstractions can be important. They are useful for certain kinds of analyses, where such abstraction is functional. But the detailed and nuanced explanations of particular religious traditions gained from ethnographic and historical studies, with their mind-boggling internal varieties, are likely to outpace (under any scenario I can imagine) anything that cognitive approaches might provide. Such approaches are destined to be supplements, sideshows to the main event: the careful work—ethnographic and historical—of the religion scholar.

In chapter 8, Davis takes up the “contentious moral debate” regarding abortion and stem cells. He explores radical differences in ethical perception among Christians, Jews, and Japanese Buddhists regarding the moral status of prenatal life. While none regard such life (blastocyst, embryo, or fetus...