In this essay, we discuss the “inner logic” of religion(s). That is, how religious thinking and acting is important to understand on their own terms and not simply as merely psychological or sociological in nature. Unfortunately, across the social sciences, a typical approach to the study of religion and religions is to reduce religion to sociology or to psychology by imposing sociological or psychological perspectives onto religion.
...In a highly-cited article on the influence of religion on American adolescents, Smith proposed nine factors that explain, or at least hint at, religion’s unique effects on what social scientists commonly term “pro-social behaviors.” Of these, he includes such items as the ability of religion to provide moral directives, embodied role models, coping skills, and cultural and social capital, to name a few....
...he says, each religion’s peculiar content, its specific beliefs and expectations, are inseparably linked to the outcomes the religion produces.
In short, he argues that there is something distinctly religious about religion that cannot be understood in “other than religious” terms. ...We follow Smith in suggesting the need to preserve and even enhance a formal appreciation of the explanatory power of religion.
In a wonderful book (with a subtitle that summarizes it well) called Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What To Do About It, author and Episcopalian minister David Zahl argues that it is not so much that Americans are less religious than we used to be but, rather, that we have transferred our innate religiosity to a variety of secular matters. Similarly, sociologist Roger Friedland argues that there is something religious about even the most secular aspects of modern life, rather than something secular, social, or utterly other-than-religious about religion.
...Each unique Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish denomination has its own particular set of beliefs and practices—and families have particular ways they live out those beliefs and practices. The philosopher George Santayana (2014) noted that “every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy” and that religion’s power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. As he puts it, “The vistas it opens and the mysteries it propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or not—is what we mean by having a religion.”
Trying to understand a given religion without attending to its particular manifestations throughout time and space is, Santayana argues, to “attempt to speak without speaking any particular language.” To try and understand religious-ethnic families without attempting to understand their particular religions, logics, and/or lived experience would be to devise a theory of those families that is not actually about them....
...In our efforts to better understand and better serve religious families, both the processes of how religions work and the content of the diverse religious traditions that carry out these processes must be understood in their own distinctly religious language and on their own terms.
As humans, we tend to hunger for and seek ultimate meaning—and many do so through a particular religion and religious logic....