CAPTIVE GODS

A learned excursus into the sociology of religion.

Appiah, well known for his contributions to social science, here examines the late-19th-century rise of two of its constituent disciplines, sociology and anthropology, and their treatment of religion. Whereas religion had earlier been largely viewed as all-encompassing, it came to be seen as “more a product of political and social forces than a shaper of them,” just another component of culture. Looking closely at pioneers such as Edward Burnett Tylor, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, Appiah discerns “a larger disciplinary toolkit emerging from their years of wrestling with religion.” Each scholar took different approaches but helped piece together the earliest dicta on how religion works: among “primitives,” as magic; among “civilized,” as a community-building system (“Religion upholds the norms of a community; magic often subverts them”). Weber would move on to dissecting Protestantism as the driving force of capitalism—injecting himself, Appiah holds, in a “social-policy debate” that found German Catholics in minority settings discriminated against economically and socially. Weber also ventured, daringly, that the isolation of individual Protestants vis-à-vis God served to “advance the economic rationality of collective enterprises.” Reading Appiah’s book, which originated as a series of lectures, presupposes background in the social sciences and their history, but he writes clearly and approachably, with interesting asides along the way (Weber, for instance, introduced into the language the term “charisma” as we now use it and “seems first to have seen charisma as the personalization of magic”). He also weighs how considering religion as a “folk category,” as social scientists do, can be alienating to practitioners: “The propositional content of the Nicene or Athanasian Creed is obscure and perhaps incoherent, but the act of avowing it can matter a lot.”

A lucid exploration of how social scientists have come to approach “the things we hold sacred.”