Thinking about Religion after September 11

American Academy of Religion

Thinking about Religion after September 11Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 by Bruce LincolnReview by: Mark JuergensmeyerJournal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 221-234Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005884 .

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Thinking about Religion after

September 1 1

/ \A jj X_ REVIEW ESSAY

Mark Juergensmeyer

Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11. By Bruce Lincoln.

University of Chicago Press, 2003. 142 pages. $25.00.

THERE IS NO QUESTION that the American public began to look at religion differently after the horrible acts of September 11, 2001. Sad to say, it may have taken events of this magnitude to shake the populace into an awareness that religion has - and always has had - a dark side. Though Islam was unfairly singled out as the proponent of violence sans pareil, it is fair to say that after September 1 1 all religion began to be viewed with a more jaundiced eye, as something that could inspire vengeance and viciousness as well as comfort and peace.

But most scholars of religion already knew this. As affectionately as they may have regarded their subject matter and as pious as they may have been in their personal life, they know their subject well enough to know that it is a mixed bag. Most scholars had no illusions about the ability of religion to be manipulated, misused, transformed, and reinterpreted in ways that are both potent and pernicious.

Mark Juergensmeyer is a professor of sociology and religious studies and the director of global and international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9430.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2004, Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 221-234 DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfhOlO © 2004 The American Academy of Religion



222 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

In my own case, I had followed the activities of al Qaeda and various groups related to religious violence for years, so September 1 1 - though disturbing and horrific - was not an occasion for surprise. I had interviewed one of the men involved in the early attempt to bomb the World Trade Center and knew that if Mahmud Abouhalima and his colleagues had been more successful at that time they would have brought down one of the central columns of one of the towers. With it the whole tower would have crumbled. The building would have come down immediately, not allowing for the hour or so for its terrified occupants to escape - the hour that saved so many lives on September 1 1 when the buildings imploded into their own square-block footprint. The tower that was attacked in the earlier attempt would have collapsed sideways into the second tower, bringing it down, and then both edifices would have collapsed sideways, destroying many other buildings in the shadow of the two enormous towers - rather than destroying only the two buildings themselves as occurred on September 11. If it had been successful, the earlier attempt would have taken as many as 200,000 lives, far more than the 3,000 who tragically died in 2001. As I watched on television the horrifying images of the Twin Towers as they crumbled into dust, I experienced a sense of amazement that finally, after all these years, they had done it, along with the sadness that I felt at the tragedy of so many lives lost and the relief that even more people had not perished in the disaster.

So as horrific as the images of September 1 1 were, they did not surprise those of us who had studied religious terrorist movements. Nor did most scholars who study religion find the event itself beyond conception. What we did not expect was the enormous public reaction - the newspaper headlines on September 12 that described the world "at war," the presidential address that said we were in "the first war of the twenty-first century," the quick comparisons to Pearl Harbor. We did not expect that the American public and its leaders would so quickly adopt a view of the world in a total global war - one with moral and spiritual valence - the same sort of cosmic struggle that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network imagined themselves to be in when they attacked the World Trade Center. Few of us were prepared for that extraordinary mood of militancy. Nor were we quite prepared for the enormous public interest in religion that came in the wake of the attack - the religiosity of America's own war rhetoric and a fascination with the dark side of religion that the events of September 1 1 displayed.

As a result of September 1 1 the public has begun to look at religion differently. It has begun to see it as a source of support for both sides of a global war, as well as a source for peace. As members of the media and the general public turned to scholars of religion to ask why this is increasingly



Juergensmeyer: Thinking about Religion after September 1 1 223

the case, we have rightly been prepared to persuade those who inquire that it is not. This kind of bellicose saber- rattling is not characteristic of Christianity, Islam, or any other religion, we wanted to say. In a sense we were trying to assure the public that religion has not essentially changed.

Perhaps, though, we were less able to persuade ourselves. I suspect that September 1 1 has had a disturbing effect on the way in which we as scholars, as well as the general public, think about our subject matter. The question for which there is not an easy answer is whether, as a result of our awareness of the stridency of religion in public life in the contemporary world, as symbolized by September 11, those of us who have undertaken the business of understanding and teaching about religion have changed our views about how we conceive what we study and how we do what we do.

The answer to that question is not a simple one. Not all scholars are the same, of course, and the answer depends in part on what it is that scholars study in the first place. Those who focus on the Pentateuch, for instance, will feel less pressure to reconceive their task than those who are Islamicists or sociologists of religion. Yet in the days immediately after September 1 1 virtually all scholars of religion were under siege from the media, the general public, and their own colleagues about why religion could possibly be associated with such terrible things.

Even those of us who knew nothing about Islam were called on to speak about Islam. In most cases we had a litany of responses prepared for the predictable questions: Yes, there is a violent potential in most religious traditions. No, religion does not ordinarily lead to violence, nor was the violence of September only about religion. Yes, there has been a militant side to the Islamic tradition, just as there has been in most traditions - look at the wars in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, for instance, or the Mahabharata and Ramayana of Hinduism. No, Islam is not more violent than most religions - the term jihad can mean a spiritual struggle as well as a militant one, and, besides, the very name Islam is cognate with salaam and shalom and means "peace."

September 1 1 forced most of us to learn a lot more about Islam than we already knew and to make public pronouncements in its defense. After years in which the field of comparative religion was at the periphery of religious studies, suddenly all scholars of religion have become, in a sense, comparativists. In an era of multiculturalism, in which increasingly all religions are everywhere and to know about religion in general more and more requires us to know a little bit about every religion, the rapid crash courses that we have been taking in Islam are not necessarily bad things.

But it is not only Islam and the diversity of religion that September 1 1 has forced us to talk about. It is its public face - a face that is increasingly




configured in a scowl rather than religion's predicable beatific smile. Why, we are asked, has religion become so visible, so pushy?

This is a difficult question, much more problematic than the matter of refuting the alleged violence of Islam, and it forces us to make a basic choice about how we are going to answer it. Here is the dilemma: When we are asked about why religion has become so stridently resurgent in public life around the world, are we going to try to make some observation about religion - to explain how it has the capacity to legitimize both good and evil, to validate both horrific and pacific visions of the world? Or are we going to assess trends in society, politics, or some other aspect of the wider world to explain how these led to September 1 1 and all of the other recent examples of religion's angry assertion in public life? To put it simply, when someone asks us to explain the recent rise in religious activism around the world, are we going to talk about religion or about the society that produces it?

This is a fundamental choice, and it goes straight to the heart of our business as scholars of religion. It goes back to the old debate about whether religion should be studied from the inside - from the point of view of the believers and practitioners - or from the outside - from the larger social framework. It is a difference in perspective that sometimes divides the textual scholars and comparativists from the anthropologists and sociologists of religion, but it cuts through all disciplinary approaches. At its heart is the questions of whether people do religious things only for religious reasons and whether there is something to religion that can only be studied from within.

Years ago when I was at Berkeley I was part of an attempt by several University of California faculty members led by sociologist Robert Bellah to create a graduate program in the study of religion. It was resisted by some members of the faculty on the basis of university politics and by others for reasons that were intellectual. "The study of religion," one philosopher intoned, "has nothing of wissenschaftlich interest to it." His point was that once one has studied religion from the point of view of the sociology, anthropology, and philosophy of religion, there is nothing else worthy of being known.

We resisted that argument at the time. But rather than facing it head-on and asserting that there is indeed something of intellectual interest - something wissenschaftlich - about the study of religion, we said that whatever religion is as a subject for study, it is an important aspect of human affairs and commands diverse perspectives in making sense of it. It is like the field of politics: a facet of human activity that by its sheer persistence and social influence warrants a whole field of scholarly scrutiny. Perhaps there is no single disciplinary approach to




its study (a notion that some political scientists continue to debate), but one could justify the creation of a graduate program solely on the merits of the importance of the field.

I still feel that this argument is sufficient to justify the existence of undergraduate and graduate programs in religion, even if we avoid taking the more controversial stance that there is something about religion that requires special analytic skills and frames of reference to make sense of it. But when we observe that people do religious things for religious reasons, when we see that religion itself is a force that shapes political and social life rather than only the other way around, the notion that there is something wissenschaftlich about religion persists. Those of us who try to make sense of religion in public life continue to be haunted by the idea that what we are studying is special, that it requires a stretch of imagination and interpretation that only an insider's perspective can supply. Yet we have no easy models for such scholarship, especially within the social sciences.

There are traditions of scholarship, however, that do deal with religion from an insider's perspective. Theology is one. Textual studies and the history of religions are others. By "history of religions" I mean the school of thinking often identified with the University of Chicago's program in comparative religion and its great exemplars, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Kitagawa. Theirs was an American attempt to create a discipline of religious studies similar to what has been known on the European continent as religionswissenshaft and ecole sociologique. Today this field has no outspoken exponents in the United States, though their familiar artifacts of analysis - myth and ritual - are ably scrutinized by such contemporary scholars as Chicago's Wendy Doniger and Bruce Lincoln. They, and many other scholars of textual studies and comparative religion, may be considered this generation's historians of religions - even though Lincoln, for one, sometimes distances himself from the term. In Holy Terrors, for instance, he describes himself as a historian of religions in the introduction but then in the last chapter charts a middle course between materialists and "romantics" such as historians of religions, who in his assignation adopt a persistently positive view of religion's social role.

But regardless of what they call themselves, if we call them as we see them, Doniger, Lincoln, and many other contemporary scholars of religious myth and ritual are indeed the historians of religions of our day. They have self-consciously crafted an approach that borrows freely in its methodologies - a "toolbox," as Doniger once described her own range of theoretical insights - but they take their subject seriously. What char- acterizes them is not so much methodology or a fascination with myth and ritual as it is their characterization of religious matters as things that




are worthy of study on their own. I think that it is fair to say that in their view religion is a unique phenomenon that requires at least sympathy, if not an empathetic insider's approach to understanding it. Perhaps, then, insights from the school of the history of religions can help us in understanding religion after September 11.

But before we even begin applying insights from the history of religions we have to be convinced that we are indeed dealing with religious phenomena. To what extent are the acts of September 1 1 religious? My guess is that regardless of the assertions of the media and the public - and even ourselves in our more pastoral moments - most of us who study religion accept that September 1 1 and other recent acts of religious terrorism are, alas, religious events. They are not just pseudoreligious, as some of religion's more pious defenders would describe them, but, rather, are centrally related to the language, images, practices, and history of faith.

So despite the pious protests that came from some quarters that religion really had nothing to do with September 11, we scholars have had our private doubts. Clearly, the actions on September 1 1 were done with a religious fervor and with all the rhetoric and ritual of religious acts. We know that this kind of terrorism, though perhaps not warranted by the high moral canons of Islam or any other religion, is within the realm of the darker side of the religious imagination. The assault on the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and the release of nerve gas in the Tokyo subways by the Aum Shinrikyo movement are, in this way of thinking, also religious acts, forms of Christian and Buddhist terrorism respectively. They are signs that religion is being reasserted into public life in the postmodern world literally with a vengeance. To explain this religious phenomenon is not just a matter of explaining a few deviant sects, for what has been dragged into the public spotlight and put on display is the whole body of religion and the historical and theological dimensions of its violent side.

In the most original part of Lincoln's book Holy Terrors he provides an exegesis of what might be regarded as some of the most significant sacred pronouncements of our day. All of these were in 2001: the instructions given to the hijackers on September 11, President George W. Bush's speech to the nation on October 7, Osama bin Laden's televised statement aired the same day, and Jerry Falwell's conversation with Pat Robertson broadcast on The 700 Club on September 13. Each of these, Lincoln shows, is a striking example of what I have called the "religionization" of politics - the implantation of the elements of religious drama onto the contemporary social world.

In this section of the book Lincoln provides a definitive characterization of September 1 1 as a religious act. Lincoln's close reading of the "final




instructions to the hijackers" - the documents found in the luggage of one of the September 1 1 hijackers, Mohammed Atta - demonstrates to anyone who might still have had doubts that September 1 1 was religious to the core. Doing what historians of religions do best - re-creating the internal logic of religious acts and language - Lincoln brilliantly dissects the religious strands of a terrorist act. He leaves us with no doubt that Mohammed Atta and his eighteen accomplices on that dark morning of September were filled with a religious zeal and undertook their hideous assignment in a ritualistic act of self-sacrifice following traditional tenets.

Moreover, although the ideology of their mentors was influenced by a certain strain of Islamic political thought characterized by the writings of Mawlana Mawdudi, Hasan al-Banna, and Abd al-Salam Faraj, to which only a minority of Muslims subscribe, Lincoln shows that the religious practices and rituals were themselves not deviant. The actions prescribed for the nineteen on the morning of September 1 1 were well within the norm, not only for Islamic belief and practice but also for many other religious traditions. One could say on the basis of this text that Atta and his colleagues, skewed though their political views may have been, died as good Muslims. Had they been Christians or Hindus, they would have died as good adherents of those faiths as well.

Most studies of religion outside of Christian Europe and America abound in examples of ritualized torture, sacred retribution, and warring religious factions. It is true that if our religious references are confined to the local Presbyterian church, we seldom see examples of killing for Christ. Yet even here there are notable examples. The Reverend Paul Hill, a Presbyterian pastor in Florida, was recently executed in a Florida prison for his role in shooting an abortion clinic doctor and his aide with a rifle at point-blank range. The recent capture of Eric Robert Rudolph, the militia member with a history of Christian Identity teachings in his background, reminds us of the virulent strand of violence that lurks within America's Christian Right and which is seldom explored by American scholars of religious studies.

Timothy McVeigh's religiosity, for example, remains terra incognita to most members of the public in large part because members of the news media do not consistently characterize him as a "Christian terrorist" the way that Osama bin Laden is described as a Muslim one. Yet McVeigh's antiglobal, antigovernment ideology has a deeply religious connection. It is related to the radical racial separatism of the Christian Identity movement that has also motivated Rudolph, who allegedly ignited the terrorist bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, and Buford Furrow, who attacked a Jewish day care center in Granada Hills, California, in 1999. It has also been in the background of such movements as the Posse Comitatus, the Order,




the Aryan Nation, the supporters of Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Herbert Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God, and the Freeman Compound. It was also popular in many militia movements throughout the United States.

McVeigh was exposed to Identity thinking through the militia culture with which he was associated and through his connections with the Christian Identity encampment, Elohim City, on the Oklahoma-Arkansas border. McVeigh also imbibed Identity ideas through The Patriot Report, an Arkansas-based Christian Identity newsletter that McVeigh received, and perhaps most of all from the novel The Turner Diaries (Barricade Books, 1978), which some of McVeigh's friends described as "his bible" and which he hawked at gun shows. McVeigh even telephoned the late author, William Pierce - including a conversation with him shortly before the Oklahoma City attack. Pierce had created his own religion, which he called Cosmotheism, based loosely on Christian Identity ideas. The Turner Diaries, written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, was Pierce's main vehicle for such Identity/Cosmotheist ideas as the apocalyptic battle imagined between freedom fighters and a dictatorial American government. It became an underground classic, selling 200,000 copies at gun shows and through mail-order catalogs. The modus operandi McVeigh used in destroying the Oklahoma City Federal Building is almost exactly the same as the one used by patriotic guerillas to attack government buildings in Pierce's novel.

Like McVeigh, the characters in The Turner Diaries have little interest in organized churches but are intensely religious in a Christian patriot way. The members of the novel's patriotic order are spiritually armed to be "bearers of the Faith" in a godless world. What Pierce and Christian Identity activists yearned for was a merger of religion and state in a new society governed by religious law. They believed that the great confrontation between freedom and a government-imposed slavery was close at hand and that their valiant, militant efforts could frighten the evil system and awaken the spirit of the freedom-loving masses.

This was apparently the point of McVeigh's attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building. It was meant as a wake-up call to the American people. McVeigh undoubtedly thought of it as something morally sanctioned and heroic, as his unrepentant comments after the bombing clearly indicate. There is no question that many of the hundreds of thousands of readers of The Turner Diaries regarded him, to some extent, as the patriot and hero that he imagined himself to be. Even religious activists in other traditions thought of McVeigh's act as understandable and, to some, commendable. One of the Muslim activists convicted of bombing the World Trade Center told me in a prison interview conducted during the time of McVeigh's trial, that the Oklahoma City attack was undertaken




for a clear reason - to "send the message that the government is the enemy" - and that the action had achieved its result.

I have described the religiosity of McVeigh at some length in order to buttress Lincoln's point that terrorist acts like the bombing of the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City are religious acts. It is unfortunate that the religious nature of terrorism associated with Islam has received far more scrutiny than the terrorism associated with other religions, including the Jewish terrorism of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir, the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Christian terrorism of McVeigh, Rudolph, and other Christian activists. It would have been helpful, for instance, if Lincoln had included a close reading of The Turner Diaries alongside his close reading of Atta's "final instructions." But no matter: the World Trade Center attack is the one that looms largest in the minds of most Americans, and it is a useful place to begin in understanding the religious nature of a certain kind of religious terrorism.

This is why the first half of Lincoln's book is so helpful. It adopts the historian of religions' perspective on contemporary social phenomena. What is increasingly clear is that at this particular moment of history, with the growing public role played by what we like to think of as private forms of religion, each group of scholars desperately needs the expertise and the insights of the other: the social scientific study of religion needs the viewpoint of theology and the history of religions, and the reverse is true as well. Never have insider and outsider approaches been more relevant to each other. In this regard it is impressive to see a historian of religions such as Bruce Lincoln reach out to social and political analysis and try to make sense of the public life of religion.

This is the concern of the whole of Lincoln's Holy Terrors, but there is a radical shift of tone between the first and second halves of the book. The first three chapters, with their fresh insights into the words of bin Laden, Bush, and Falwell, are meditations on recent events and speak with the authority of shared experience. The second half of the book is less convincing. Considering the strong opening chapters, it is puzzling why this should be the case.

Part of the reason is that the first essays are indeed recent: they are grounded in contemporary case studies of religion in public life. The last three essays are different. They were written long before 2001 and published in other places, and together they lack the coherence and weight that one can create by making a sustained argument over a single book-length manuscript. It is interesting to speculate on how Lincoln would have written these essays if indeed they were a product of his thinking about religion "after September 11," as the subtitle of the book suggests.




But there is also a difference in approach between the first and second halves of the book, a contrast in scholarly styles that is instructive. I think that what Lincoln wants to say in these chapters is very important - that in a postmodern and globalized world religion has been imported into public life for understandable reasons. Among other things it preserves cultural and social identities and restores a sense of coherence and mean- ing to social life and to the individuals engaged in it. In many cases it provides the resources for rebellion against social and cultural systems deemed oppressive. These are points that Lincoln makes more obliquely but brilliantly in his dissection of the Bush, bin Laden, and Falwell statements and which in these last three essays he presents in a more abstract way. The abstraction is part of the problem.

Even in the more abstract discussion in the last three chapters, however, Lincoln does what historians of religions are trained to do: enter into the worldviews implicit in religious acts and thought. In the cases of religious activism in this book it is not myth that is the subject but, rather, religious groups, and in the last three chapters the subject is not just persons and groups but whole cultures of religious societies. In an interesting way, in these chapters Lincoln does to entire worldviews what he does so well with specific myths: re-create the internal logic of the system. But to do so requires him to make some basic generalizations about those worldviews and their relation to social patterns and political institutions.

Ordinarily, when historians of religions generalize they begin with specific cases and tentatively extend insights gleaned from those cases into other, similar phenomena. The same is true of historians in general. Within the social sciences, anthropologists and cultural sociologists also adopt a rich descriptive approach to the analysis of case studies. It is a habit of many other sociologists and political scientists to work the other way around. They begin with general hypotheses and apply them to cases. They tend to privilege what they like to call "theory," which often amounts to their own hunches about how the world works, and apply this in an abstract way to social phenomena in general. Sometimes this sort of theory works; sometimes it does not.

This way of generalizing about religion is treacherous water in which many scholars have floundered. But Lincoln plunges in with courage where many before him have perished. Picking up a cue from these kinds of social scientists, he resorts to categorization as a way of characterizing trends and differences within religious life in general. But making such broad sweeps can be perilous. One thinks of the political scientist Samuel Huntington, who embarked on an essay in which he wanted to point out the resurgence of culture in political affairs - surely a worthy thesis with which most sensible persons would agree - and then became mired in a




defense of his categorization of religions in a clash of civilizations that almost everyone has found reason to criticize. Creating categories can be as obfuscating as it is clarifying, and it may result in as much effort expended in defending the choice of terms as in describing the phenomenon in the first place.

Lincoln's categories are cases in point. He dazzles us with an ample display. There are four domains of religion: discourse, practices, community, and institution. There are three strands of culture - ethics, aesthetics, and religion - and three types of religion - status quo, resistance, and revolution. And there are two forms of religious discourse, maximalist and minimalist. There are also charts. The ones in the chapter on religion and politics are particularly baffling, in that I could determine no obvious relationship between them and the cases that are discussed in the text. Nor do the phrases in the charts always mirror the text's generalizations. In the text Lincoln rightly points out the problem of talking about secularism - the need to make a distinction about whether one is referring to the secularism of the society as a whole or to the stance of the political order to institutionalize religion - but then the charts simplify in a way that is unclear. In the charts' categories of the different ways in which religion can rebel against the secular state and create a basis for religious states, the subtleties in the distinction between institutional religion and politics and popular religion and social values are no longer apparent.

The problem is not just that categorization simplifies: it creates the illusion of intellectual rigor when in fact it may lead to the opposite, for it can mask the complexities that lie beneath the categorical terms. Let us take "ethics, aesthetics, and religion" as Lincoln's three categories of culture. In many modern cultures this distinction works reasonably well. In other cultures, however, where religion is the dominant culture, the distinction is problematic. In these areas, to describe culture as ethics, aesthetics, and religion is like describing edibles as oranges, apples, and food.

Or take the maximal/minimal distinction. This turns out to be another slippery categorization. Lincoln introduces the dichotomy in the opening remarks of the book and discusses it further - complete with a chart - in an otherwise thoughtful chapter on the relation of religion to culture and in a chapter on the postcolonial state, where it refers to secular and nonsecular states. But he introduces the terms in quite a different way in reference to religion's role within culture. Here the term maximalist replaces fundamentalist. Lincoln avoids the latter term because it is "inflammatory" (5) and does not point to what he thinks is crucial, which the maximalist term supplies: the notion that religion embraces all of society, all of life.




This is a helpful distinction - the notion that in some contexts religion is more of a totalizing worldview than in others - but it becomes problematic when one begins to use it as a category, in part because it concentrates solely on religion, not the social context. The term does not embrace the culture of society as a whole, just the religious aspect. One won- ders, then, what replaces religion in a minimal situation where it is not part of a totalizing worldview. The chart on page 59 gives a peculiar and enigmatic answer: it is the economy. The economy? Not modernity, individualism, the social compact, democracy, or popular culture but, indeed, economy?

It is an interesting hypothesis that modern consumer culture replaces the role traditionally supplied by religion in a total worldview. It may even be defensible if one takes the time and care to state the case. But it deserves that statement, and one would hope for a fuller explication of this odd and certainly controversial thesis than the insertion of a single term in an eight-cell matrix.

Moreover, the maximal/minimal distinction muddles together every- thing that is not a part of "economy" - presumably a modern consumer culture - into the maximalist category. Maximalists, it would seem, are those who take religion seriously, from Mormons, to Amish, to al Qaeda. But then the term would also include the corner vicar, the local Jehovah's Witnesses, and my Buddhist mother-in-law with her wall of statues and incense - and it pains me to see them crowded in that category along with all of the ayatollahs and Christian militia.

So there are problems with these categories. For one thing the rush to categorize is a rather old-fashioned social science technique. Lincoln's typology of religion as "status quo, resistance, and revolution," for instance, is eerily similar to the types of social movements described by sociologist Neil Smelser in his Theory of Collective Behavior (Free Press, 1963), published in the early 1960s. When Lincoln first published this essay in 1985 in an edited volume with the same title, such social science terms may have seemed avant-garde when employed by a scholar whose primary occupation was textual analysis. But now, almost twenty years later and in a post-September 1 1 world, the terms in this chapter seem wooden, dated. What is more avant-garde these days within the social sciences, especially anthropology and sociology, is the rediscovery of the power of narrative description - even fiction - in conveying social insights, precisely the sort of thing that Lincoln does so well in the first half of this book, with the Atta text and the Bush and bin Laden public speeches, and exactly the kind of sensitive analysis that the field of the history of religions has demonstrated for years.

But although he uses the old social science technique of charts and typologies in the second half of his book, Lincoln does retain one central




facet of the historian of religions' approach, its sphere of reference: religion itself. But this internal perspective on religion - which one might regard as the great strength of the history of religions approach - is undermined by the very categories that Lincoln uses to try to make sense of it. The holistic view of religion becomes severed into types. In one peculiar moment in the essay Lincoln is trapped by his own logic into characterizing whole religious traditions: Confucianism, Jainism, and Buddhism are religions of resistance, for example. So are black churches and Pentecostal groups in the United States.

Yet this simple codification is undermined by Lincoln's own observation that a group adopts a stance of resistance only in relationship to a group or stratum of society that it resists. Hence, such a stance is always historically and geographically specific. Some black churches are as middle class and status quo as you can get, and Buddhism in some places is the ideology of an oppressive state. To characterize a religion or a religious group as "status quo" or "resistant" by itself is a kind of reification on a grand scale. This is the kind of thinking that got Samuel Huntington into trouble with his clash of civilizations, and this pattern of reification is a social science habit of thought that a historian of religions should be well advised to avoid.

Still, there is much about the social science perspective on the study of religion that is useful for those who usually study religion from the inside out. This is especially true in the contemporary social situation, a time of intense globalization in which rapid social and economic changes are linked with cultural responses such as rebellious religious movements and strident politicized religious ideologies. It is the tendency of social scientists to look at these phenomena and ask not what went wrong with religion but what went wrong with the modern world to produce such sociocultural responses. This is a sober and realistic point of view for religionists to heed. What is useful about all of Lincoln's essays - both the first and second halves of the book - is that they show the importance of taking seriously this wider socioeconomic world when one tries to understand contemporary religion.

Similarly, social scientists need to understand religion from within. The mechanical application of social and political models to religious movements is demonstrably insufficient. Take rational choice theory, for example, which is wildly popular in many departments of political science. It flounders when forced to explain the reasoning of religious political actors for whom the timelines are very long - generations, even eternities - and the rewards are otherworldly, even transcendent. Moreover, even if one is determined to apply rational choice theory to such cases, undeterred by good advice, one first must understand the internal reasoning of the religious actors. This means that the first scholarly task




for the social science scholar is a kind of theological one: understanding the religious rationale from inside.

Perhaps one could coin a new term for such an approach - sodotheology, for instance - to label this effort to merge the insiders' understanding of religion with the outsiders' appreciation of the social forces that shape its particular context. Yet it seems to me that such a term is not really necessary. Sensitive social science and socially conscious theology and textual studies are doing that already. The field of the history of religions and the culturally sensitive side of anthropology and sociology have already met and are lustily cohabitating. Lincoln's essays are, despite their limitations, good cases in point. Much to his credit, he is a historian of religions who is trying to reach out to the broader social location of religious groups and actions and attempting to make sense of the role of religion in an arena of social conflict. If anything, September 1 1 should have taught us that often what appears to be a religious act occurs within social and political contexts in which this act may be seen as a religious response to social-political problems. The trick is to take seriously both - the social causes and the religious responses - without ignoring or trivializing either.



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Thinking about Religion after September 11