The Air We Breathe: Sociology of Religion

George Sanders, Ph.D.
Vanderbilt University, 2008

Like many undergraduate students, I did not enter college with a clear goal. So I found myself exploring many different classes across the university curriculum. The problem wasn’t that I was dissatisfied with a particular topic, discipline, or major. It was the opposite. Just about everything I studied held some attraction or fascination for me. The more I ventured across different academic terrains, the more I became curious about what else there was to know. The first couple of years I probably declared a new major every single semester.

College, in some ways, is a real-life adventure. There we can take responsible risks and allow ourselves to be challenged, setting aside what we think we know and what we take for granted as being “real” or “true.” This is what I like most about the sociology and specifically the sociology of religion. For those whose religion occupies a central place in their lives - who are guided by their religious principles and practices - their truth is incontrovertible and their reality is well structured. And yet we recognize that in an increasingly diverse society, people’s truths and realities vary significantly. To me the sociology of religion makes space for that fact. Sociology provides the empirics, the tools, and the scientific bona fides for making sense out of multiple realities and multiple truths. In doing so, sociology delicately balances the relative with the absolute.

These presuppositions guide all of my research, which to this point has examined the role of the sacred in a consumer-driven, postmodern context. For me personally, the highlight of my scholarly explorations has been the manner in which we as a society have proven quite capable of realizing transcendence and a sense of enchantment in spite of an environment saturated by rationalizing mechanisms.

Oakland University has been a welcome and welcoming setting for my work. Situated outside the city of Detroit, the region is, in spite of reasonable expectations, undergoing a kind of miraculous resurrection. It is nothing short of inspiring, something keenly reflected in my students; they are committed to realizing transformation and they refuse to abandon their wide-eyed wonder. Indeed, I’d have to say that those students are pretty darn awesome.

Josh Packard, Ph.D.
Vanderbilt University, 2008

When I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to visit a synagogue, a church and a mosque in the same semester for one of my courses. I remember being struck by their remarkable similarity. I found myself coming back, time and again, to the ways that people managed to organize their religious expressions in remarkably consistent ways even if those expressions were directed at unique expressions of God. This, to me, suggested something about the universality of religion. I did not know it at the time, but I was taking my first steps toward a sociological understanding of religion.

I remember, distinctly, my early conversations with friends, parents and pastors about the connections I saw between the role of ritual, the construction of belief and the common distinctions that religious systems made between the sacred and the everyday. I struggled to explain what I was thinking and they, as often as not, struggled to understand. Indeed, it is difficult to explain the sociological perspective of religion to others. It is, perhaps, too intimate for most religious people to be able to think abstractly about and too unfamiliar for the non-religious to fully grasp.

When George and I sat down to think about how we could remedy this gap for our own students, we hit on the idea of a textbook that would deal with real questions and issues in the study of religion. For me, this textbook is a natural fit with the kind of research and scholarship I already do. I began my formal research into religion with my dissertation, which was later turned into a book, The Emerging Church: Religion at the Margins. More recently, I wrote, with a student of mine, Church Refugees: Sociologists Reveal Why People are DONE with Church but not their Faith. Both of these books, and the articles and presentations that make up the rest of my research take a pragmatic approach. I had a question that I wanted to answer.

It helps that I work at The University of Northern Colorado where the sociology department has an explicitly applied focus. We take the approach that a sociological understanding of the world helps our students to do their jobs better and create a more critical, well-informed citizenry. I believe those values represented in my own scholarship and department are present in this textbook as well. As I wrote, outlined chapters and tracked down references, I often found myself returning to those early conversations I had as an undergraduate. I wanted this textbook to be a helpful way to frame conversations about religion from a sociological perspective. With all of that in mind, I hope you find this book to be, above all else, useful. I know that writing it has been immensely valuable for me and the conversations I continue to have with my students, colleagues, friends and family.