Propuesta de análisis de oferta adicional a menor precio

Participants’ understandings of religion as belief have been partly shaped by widely- accepted constructions of religion as a distinctive set of propositional beliefs. Jordan, one of Day’s participants, described a Christian as ‘someone who believes in God and Jesus and Bible and stuff’, which as Day notes, simply reflected ‘how the term “belief” has become associated with “Christian” over the centuries’ (2009b:266-7). Similar understandings of Christianity, and the relationship between religion and belief, were articulated by my participants. In their constructions of religion as individualised beliefs about God that could not be supported by empirical evidence, participants’ understanding of religion would seem to have been influenced by what Guignon describes as ‘the modern worldview’ (2004:26). The conception of religion as private belief is not, as anthropologist Talal Asad notes, one that has been accepted in all places at all times; rather, it has its own particular history, emerging from the social transformations that occurred in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. At this time ‘religion’ gradually moved from the public to the private sphere, and soon came to be understood primarily as a matter of individual belief: ‘Discipline (intellectual and social) would, in this period, gradually abandon religious space, letting “belief’”, ‘”conscience”, and “sensibility” take its place’ (1993:39). For Asad, this understanding of religion is also closely related to the history of the modern, secularised state. It was, he argues, not until after the ‘Wars of Religion’ in the seventeenth century, that definitions of religion ‘stressed the

184 propositional – as opposed to political or institutional – character of religion’ (1993:41). But, as Smith notes, by the mid-eighteenth century, the notion that ‘a religion is something that one believes or does not believe, something whose propositions are true or are not true’ had ‘sunk deep into the European consciousness’ (1991:40). This understanding of religion remains influential. As religion scholar David Morgan has observed, the academic study of religion in the West continues to be ‘shaped by the idea that a religion is what someone believes’ and that this amounts to a ‘discrete, subjective experience of assent to propositions concerning the origin of the cosmos, the nature of humanity, the existence of deities, or the purpose of life’ (2010:1).

Participants also understood religion to be concerned with propositional belief. As such, religious truth claims were understood as explanatory and similar to scientific hypotheses that could be proved with empirical evidence. As Guignon argues, the rise of science led to the disenchantment of the world, such that there are ‘no mysterious or supernatural principles at work’ (2004:31). The ‘immanence of God in the everyday workings of the world’ has been ‘replaced by scientific explanations’ (Fitzgerald 2007b:54). This can also be seen to have influenced the participants’ perceptions of what it means to be ‘religious’. As many of them thought that science provided explanations of the world, religion no longer served this purpose and was reduced to what some individuals choose to privately believe.

Although fourth century creeds of the early Christian church and the Islamic shahada, or ‘testimony’ of faith indicate that propositional beliefs have had a long history and played a central role in some religious traditions, this is not true of all other faiths. It is also important to note that there is more to Christian or Islamic belief than the assent to propositions. But understanding religious belief as primarily

185 propositional and explanatory in nature has been influential not only for western constructions of religion, but also for constructions of the concept of belief itself. As Fitzgerald notes, although ‘belief’ is a ‘multivalent word’, it has become ‘over determined by Protestant enlightenment intellectualism’, and is now widely understood ‘as a kind of imperfect propositional knowledge’ (2007a:13). This understanding of religion and beliefs has been challenged by anthropologists and theorists of religion studying the history of belief (Needham 1972; Ruel 1982; Smith 1991; Asad 1993), as well as by those focusing on how characterisations of religion as belief often fail to reflect how either religion or belief function in the lives of many people today (Lindquist & Coleman 2008; Morgan 2010; Day 2011; Day & Lynch 2013; Vasquez 2011; Harvey 2013). But constructions of religion as propositional belief, along with assumptions that this is the most significant type of belief in people’s lives, continue to influence not only academic studies of religion but also popular conceptions of religion and belief.

Understanding religion in this way is often attributed to the influence of Christianity on western scholars studying non-Christian religions and cultures, and, as Smith has observed, it has resulted in significant misrepresentation of other religious traditions (1991:180). But assuming the importance of this type of belief for western Christians might also be misleading. Religion scholars Thomas Tweed (2006) and Manuel A. Vasquez (2011) have both sought to emphasise the material, relational and experiential dimensions of religions, including those within western Christianity. And as religion scholar Graham Harvey has argued, it is important in the study of Christianity to differentiate between ‘lived Christianity’ and what he terms the ‘elite imaginary version’ (2013:192). By failing to recognise the diversity within Christianity, scholars have helped reify a particular understanding of this

186 tradition, and, for many people living in societies that have been shaped by Christianity, this has influenced perceptions of religion more generally. And the influence of this construction of religion was clearly evident in what the participants told me during their interviews.