Comparison: A Critical Primer by Aaron W. Hughes (review)

Comparison lies at the heart of the study of new religions. The category of "new religions" itself is constituted by explicit, and sometimes implicit, acts of comparison. Some religions are identified as new in contrast to others, or they are emergent in contrast to others that have been in existence longer, or they are alternatives to other religions. Intermediate categories employed in the study of new religions, such as conversion, charismatic leadership, and millennialism, are also constituted by comparisons. Further, categories applied to new religions in general discourse, such as the omnipresent problematic designation "cult," are also founded on comparisons, both with other groups believed to belong in the same category and with groups believed to belong in the contrasting category of (legitimate) "religion."

Given the importance of the process of comparison to the study of new religions, it is salutary to reflect on the roles it has played in the study of religion in general. In a brisk overview Aaron Hughes reviews and critiques the dominant modes of comparison in the study of religion and proposes a set of guidelines for undertaking responsible, and illuminating, comparisons.

Hughes finds the types of global comparisons undertaken by Joseph Campbell on the popular level and Mircea Eliade on the more scholarly level to be particularly problematic. He finds that their quest for broad patterns relied on an essentialism that erased the particularities of history and divorced religions from the human actors who made and remade them in specific times and places. He also sees a continuation of an essentializing phenomenology that grants an independent existence to "the sacred" or something similar in the contemporary work of scholars like Robert Orsi and Jeffrey Kripal. Hughes identifies a similar erasure of history in the efforts of the contemporary cognitive science of religion to determine a biological basis for human religious behavior.

At different points throughout the book, Hughes identifies what he thinks effective, responsible, yet revealing comparison consists of. He asserts, for example, that comparison "ought to be located at the intersection of historical data and theoretical sophistication" (12). Repeatedly he stresses the importance of mastery of the original languages of items to be compared and the necessity of locating them fully and accurately in their historical contexts. If anything, Hughes emphasizes the importance of historical context at the expense of theoretical sophistication. For him, comparison needs to involve items from similar historical and cultural contexts, even though he does argue that it should include attention to "how scholars working with other data (including in other disciplines) but similar questions and problems deal with similar issues" (78).

Hughes' brief and accessible consideration of the role of comparison in the study of religion is worth the careful attention of anyone who studies new religions. It forces a careful (re)consideration of what we are trying to accomplish with our fundamental categories.