The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion

by Martin Riesebrodt

Why has religion persisted across the course of human history? Secularists have predicted the end of faith for a long time, but religions continue to attract followers. Meanwhile, scholars of religion have expanded their field to such an extent that we lack a basic framework for making sense of the chaos of religious phenomena. To remedy this state of affairs, Martin Riesebrodt here undertakes a task that is at once simple and to define, understand, and explain religion as a universal concept.

Instead of propounding abstract theories, Riesebrodt concentrates on the concrete realities of worship, examining religious holidays, conversion stories, prophetic visions, and life-cycle events. In analyzing these practices, his scope is appropriately broad, taking into consideration traditions in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto. Ultimately, Riesebrodt argues, all religions promise to avert misfortune, help their followers manage crises, and bring both temporary blessings and eternal salvation. And, as The Promise of Salvation makes clear through abundant empirical evidence, religion will not disappear as long as these promises continue to help people cope with life.

Genres: Religion, Sociology, Nonfiction, Anthropology

248 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 15, 2010

Reviews

[Roland Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the biggest problems with Religious Studies as a discipline is that most scholars aren’t quite sure what religion is. There are a lot of different ways to define it, but by and large people just assume that they know whether something is or is not religious. In The Promise of Salvation (2007), Martin Riesebrodt has undertaken the breathtakingly difficult task of trying to find one definition that includes Abrahamic religions and Asian religions but excludes other creeds such as Marxism or nationalism. One of the most popular ways of defining religion is to look at its social function, which is often thought to be that it unites people into groups. As Reisebrodt notes, however, “all kinds of activities can be interpreted as socially integrative or identity creating. … The sociology of religion would therefore have to concern itself with alpinists, nudists, vegetarians, philatelists, golfers, and rabbit breeders.” No-one actually studies rabbit breeding as a religion, however, which shows that most functionalists have some other definition in the back of their heads that they aren’t willing to put to paper. Others think about religion as a series of reflections on supernatural experiences, but in doing so they imply that only mystics are truly religious and cannot explain the vast array of mundane daily religious practices carried out by people who have never heard so much as a whisper from God. Scholars who think that religions are just reflections of other social issues, such as economic inequality, end up studying economic inequality instead of religious phenomena and find themselves in a completely different discipline. Reisebrodt moves through each of the major approaches to Religious Studies and systematically discredits them. Some of his reasons for rejecting the alternatives to his own idea are somewhat glib, but by and large his criticisms are convincing.

Read my full review here: http://wordsbecamebooks.com/2016/01/2...

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first read this book, I was highly skeptical. My professor in my theory of religion class was keen on the essentialist theory propounded by MR. As a young person, I thought essentialism was evil; I thought my professor was a reactionary, defending an outdated discipline. Turns out, I was wrong. Yes, it's true, we need an anthropological/extrinsic approach, but we also need an intrinsic method. Spiritual life has substance, and a merely external technique fails to capture it. MR's solution turns on the analysis of liturgy; to understand the heart of a belief system, we must understand the structure and motivation of worship. This has practical consequences; to take one notable example, we can understand the difference between Buddhists, Hindus and atheists on the one hand and monotheists on the other as a difference in liturgy. This means we don't need to argue over whether one liturgy is superior to others. Monotheists simply want something that pagans don't want, and vice versa. The so-called 'liturgical turn,' exemplified by scholars like Agamben, shows us that most of our disputes over spirituality are simply misunderstandings. It is not meaningful to complain that my neighbor worships in a strange way; it is meaningful to analyze the grammars of worship, measuring the expressive power of incommensurable vocabularies. In any event, in retrospect, MR's book is the one I remember from my theory seminar, even though I disagreed with it on a number of details. Getting the substance right is more important than edgy post-modernism, at the end of the day.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 3 out of 5]

The theoretical/sociological part was interesting. A simple but persuasive argument for looking at religion from the perspective of action, or what Riesebrodt calls 'liturgy'. His point is that at the heart of everything that should be called 'religion' is a promise of salvation and the actions of adherents reflect that. However, the examples are pretty much old-fashioned comparative religion; broad but not going into processes but showing affinities on a quite superficial level. Also, I'm not sure if the book answers questions about religious change and phenomena (often called 'spirituality') that do not fall under the above definition of religion but are still more than hobbies, etc.

[Yiyun Guan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The analysis of the logics of virtuoso, the threefold function of religion and the interpretation of eastern religions are excellent. But the priority of ligurgy-based standpoint is not convincing for me at least, if the choice of such position is to do comparative research easier