Much of the current issue of the journal of Religion, Brain & Behavior (May) is devoted to developing a research program and theory that explains religious diversity just as Darwinian scientists have sought to explain biological diversity. Evolutionary biologists and psychologists have had difficulty in explaining the persistence and diversity of religion. Those anthropologists and other scientists studying religion tend to “read back” religious beliefs and practices to evolutionary history, usually describing them as “adaptations”; fewer engage in fieldwork much as a natural scientist would do to explain the diversity of species and organisms. Biologist David Sloan Wilson, the author of the 2002 book Darwin’s Cathedral, calls for evolutionary scientists to study religious diversity using a “cultural ecosystem approach,” where religious communities are treated as “functionally organizational units” that cooperate, compete, and colonize niches just as species do. Wilson writes that using an “axis of variation” approach for studying different religions, such as anthropologists do in characterizing cultures as “loose” and “tight” in their norms (somewhat similar to “strict” and “lax” churches), would provide a framework for understanding their evolution.
Subsequent articles responding to Wilson and colleagues’ proposal range from enthusiastic to mainly negative, with one critic writing that neither religions nor their adherents operate like “functionally organizational units.” Wilson responds by offering some hypotheses from an ecosystem approach that could be used to study religious diversity. For instance, in studying why strict churches do better than lax ones, he notes that in 19th and early-20th century America, it was necessary to belong to a church to be socially respectable, making lax (or non-demanding) churches very popular. “It was the [later] availability of a third option (no church) that made lax churches weak.” Wilson has spearheaded such research in his recent study of Binghamton, New York, though he declined to discuss any findings. For more information on this issue, visit: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rrbb20/current.
The Islamic attempts at religious arbitration in the U.S. have been more recent but also more controversial. But Broyde does not see anything in how sharia is structured that could not be aligned with American law. The two main obstacles are many Americans’ opposition to any such possibility and American Muslims’ lack of judicial expertise, organizational machinery, and practices that could legitimize its various tribunal rulings in American courts, especially on sensitive issues of family law (involving unequal treatment of women) and theological rulings. To overcome fears that Muslims are setting up a parallel legal structure alongside secular law, they may have to borrow practices from their counterparts in the UK as well as from American Jews who have been able to balance secular and religious legal norms. Broyde concludes that while religious arbitration faces church-state and religious freedom hurdles (how does a secular court deal with religious leaders disciplining a member on doctrinal matters through their arbitration systems?), accommodating a plurality of faith groups’ legal traditions and practices to deal with internal matters (such as same-sex marriage) may be the best way to overcome endless culture wars where a winner-takes-all scenario prevails.
Even for readers wary of wading into philosophical waters, the book offers interesting arguments —with many contemporary examples—of how religion influences society, even as it is changed by such encounters. For RW readers, the conclusion on secularization and the religious future may prove the most intriguing part of the book. He argues that the same trends can often mean both religious revitalization and decline, depending on the contexts in which they take place. For instance, secular states that seek to control religions typically suppress religious vitality. At the same time, the same kind of secular political control of religion tends to intensify religious identities and commitments. In other words, religious dynamics tend to “ricochet” off each other, creating a more contingent and complex religious scene than both practitioners and scholars might expect. Smith concludes by providing dozens of research questions based on his chapters in order to promote coherent and cumulative lines of inquiry.
Bibby adds that this religious middle could be seen as “spiritual but not religious,” but they have not really abandoned religion; they may be infrequent attenders, but they identify with a religion. The book finds that the Canadian low religious are holding steady (perhaps in distinction to the U.S. case, where they are thought to be shrinking), and they do not differ much by gender or even age and education. “It suggests that whether one is attracted to religion or chooses to take a pass is pretty random,” he writes. Regionally, the pro-religious are still in the Atlantic region, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan (with the Bible Belt shifting away from Alberta), and the no-religious in British Columbia, leaving Quebec, which is often characterized as secular, as the home for the low-religious. Other chapters in the fact-filled book look at the social effects of religion and non-religion and the role of death in the growth of religion and spirituality. Bibby concludes that in the case of Canada, continuing immigration will buoy religious fortunes up for the foreseeable future, though for some traditions more than others (such as mainline Protestantism), though the secular-religious polarization is likely here to stay.
