In his book Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science (Yale Univ., Oct), New York University philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah explores the work of leading sociologists and anthropologists who came to the conclusion that societies shape religion, not the other way around. He describes how four such scholars—Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—developed the modern social sciences “through their secular scientific study of religion,” said Jean E. Thompson Black, senior editor for science, medicine, and the environment at Yale University Press.
Appiah spoke with PW about his book, which Black says “pulls back the curtain on big questions about how sociology and religion are inseparable, even up to the present day.”
Why look at the relationship between religion and the secular social sciences?
The founders of these sciences thought you couldn't talk about what a society was without talking about the many roles they saw religion playing in society. In the end of the 19th century, you would have been hard pressed to get a job as a university academic if you said you were an atheist. By the early 20th century, there were people studying religion who thought of themselves as having no particular religious faith of their own.
What do you mean by “captive gods”?
All these theorists saw religious life as something that served certain social purposes. So, a religion’s “gods” were in some sense “captive” to the societies whose gods they were. In an earlier time, you might have thought societies were held by the gods, but these thinkers came to see the gods as held by society.
These thinkers lived in Christian societies. How did non-Christian religions influence their thought?
What's interesting about Judaism from the point of view of a Christian background is that it’s as much about what you do than it is about what you believe. And one of the things that Christian society would take to be central to religion, belief in God or gods, is not central to Buddhism. The very idea that you should think of Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the traditional religions of Africa and Asia as things of the same kind forced these thinkers to develop a concept of religion that’s expansive because the phenomena that people think of as religious are so diverse.
What first interested you in the study of religion?
I was raised as a Protestant in Ghana, a country full of all sorts of so-called traditional religions. I had Muslim cousins. At school, I learned a kind of Transcendental Meditation, which is a South Asian tradition. It came to puzzle me that all these very diverse things somehow seemed to people to obviously belong together. I began a sort of intellectual archeology of how it came to be that all these things got to be thought of as one thing, as religions.
