Comparative Study of Religion

Comparative religion as a discipline and enterprise has fallen into disrepute, perhaps with some justification, largely because it originated in a colonial context and has been linked to western cultural dominance and even imperialism. But that comparative religion has been problematic within Theology and Religious Studies is not sufficient reason to abandon the endeavour. Indeed, we might argue that with globalization, technologies that proclaim the dawn of the post-human, the rise of spiritualities within secularism that impact upon economies, the rise of religious nationalism, and global religious terrorism, the need for comparative religion has never been more pressing. There have been attempts to revisit comparative religion, but these are problematic because the literal comparison of religions can be so theoretically weak or arbitrary as to be of little value to the wider intellectual community or comparison can cover a hidden, pluralist theology that is unaware of its own presuppositions. Within Religious Studies, that at times has been simply identified with Comparative Religion tout court, there has been a scepticism towards the very category ‘religion,’ and the dominance of understanding religion purely in sociological terms that itself is methodologically sceptical of religious claims. In complete contrast to the sociological approach there is the explanation of religion in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology again generally sceptical of religious claims and practices.

There is a need therefore for a new kind of comparative religion, a new approach that does not simply aim at the endless comparison of religious practices and ideas, but that is theoretically and philosophically robust in taking seriously the need to explain religion on the global stage and for the human future. It seeks a repristination of the field through a number of strategies or levels of human experience. First, it operates at a civilizational level, at the level of ‘big history’ that examines patterns of human religiosity across civilizations and over long periods of time. Robert Bellah (2014) has done this kind of work from human origins up to what he concedes as the ‘axial age’. Second, it operates at a level of deep philology focused on text and the explication of text, initially on its own terms as explication that then turns into explanation. Third, such a comparative religion interfaces with other explanatory disciplines particularly the harder biological and neurological sciences but also Anthropology, Sociology, and History, and the expository disciplines of Philosophy and Theology. It seeks to offer accounts of what it is and has been to be human, i.e. anthropology in a classical Kantian sense.