Sociology professor Samuel Perry’s new book Religion for Realists: Why We All Need the Scientific Study of Religion isn’t the first time a Protestant intellectual has attempted to articulate a “realist” view on religion. The most prominent example before him comes from the Christian Realist school of thought advanced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (who identified its progenitors in Augustine and Luther), which pushed against the utopian Social Gospel adherents of his day in favor of a Christian worldview that understood the limitations of humans’ fallen natures. Perry, on the other hand, bases his “realism” not on theological but on sociological grounds, arguing that religion should not be understood as freely-chosen forms of faith but rather as tribal identities and social structures. Both forms of realism involve an acknowledgment of human limitations: Niebuhrian realism teaches that humans are limited by our sinful nature, while Perry’s realism teaches that humans are limited by the way we imagine ourselves as rational individuals.
The core of Perry’s claim, articulated over four chapters, is that the standard way we Americans understand religion is wrong compared to his “realist” view on religion. Americans typically believe that religion is about individuals coming to faith or adhering to doctrine, but in reality, Perry argues, religion is about groups forming tribal identities: that it “orients us within our in-group and it clothes ‘our people’ and ‘how we do things’ with transcendence and eternal, cosmic significance.” Perry writes that understanding religion primarily as a matter of individual faith is a very Anglo-Protestant perspective and does not reflect how most people view religion. Perry invokes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research about human reasoning, noting that humans see ourselves as rational creatures who hold our beliefs due to logical thinking, when in reality we form our beliefs due to gut reactions and group affiliations and work backwards to rationalize those beliefs. This is not a new claim, and Perry quotes H. Richard Niebuhr, writing back in 1929, that religious schisms are primarily about concerns like nationality, race, and class rather than theological disagreements.
Perry devotes an entire chapter of the book to discussing how the evangelical adoption movement of the 2000s did not actually lead to an increase in adoption rates, and that the evangelicals who did adopt children were almost always those who were infertile and wanted to have a big family like other evangelicals. In other words, the entire movement was simply a posthoc rationalization for the already existing adoptive practices of infertile evangelical couples and did not actually reflect any adherence to theology, nor did the movement actually do much to increase adoption rates, yet both evangelicals and outsiders believed in this narrative wholeheartedly.
Using this “realist” conception of religion, Perry points out that shifts in religious identification have more to do with birthrates and demographic change than any changes in theology. One data trend he uses is that Sweden will be 31% Muslim by 2050 if current birthrate, migration, and (de)conversion trends hold. Perry claims that religious people are often happier than secular people, not because they are comforted by the idea of a loving Creator, but because religion provides networks for deep social relationships to form. Perry also notes that “Thought-leaders on the far-right around the world, it turns out, are better students of how religion actually works because they are less invested in Anglo-Protestant ideals and narratives about personal faith and spiritual realities.” In other words, those we imagine as “Christian nationalists” do actually understand religion as Perry claims it really is: not as individuals gathered around a set of beliefs, but as the way groups adhere to beliefs to achieve social cohesion. Considering that Perry has been writing against Christian nationalism for years now, this is a bold claim for him to make, and one that he claims is necessary to actually understand how Christian nationalism functions.
Of course, not all practitioners of “religion for realists” have authoritarian ambitions. I was recently at a dinner where the editor of a Mormon magazine ordered a Pepsi. I asked him why he was allowed to drink Pepsi but not coffee and tea, considering that all three were caffeinated drinks. Instead of responding on doctrinal grounds, perhaps by pointing out that Joseph Smith’s claimed revelation from God only forbade Mormons to drink “hot drinks” and thus does not include caffeinated sodas, he simply replied that such rules were about forming “thick identities.” In other words, he was proclaiming that religious restrictions were more about building a strong group identity than they were about actual revelations from a divine being.
Perry is a sociologist, so the book is very sociological in nature, but I also found the book’s observations useful from an angle of political philosophy. After all, the views that Perry calls Anglo-Protestant are simply the tenets of liberalism, which can be seen as a secularized form of Anglo-Protestant beliefs. Liberalism was the purported ideology of the Anglo-Protestants that founded the United States, and for a period in the 1990s, liberalism was seen to have achieved its telos as the “end of history.” Perry’s “religion for realists” reflects a repudiation of liberalism’s universalist aspirations, one that can be seen in the growing illiberal movements on the global left and right that posit group identities over individual ones. Perhaps Reinhold Niebuhr was right after all: human beings can never reach perfection on Earth because of our fallen natures, and thus perhaps the idea that liberalism could ever be the “final” form of government is just as hubristic as the Social Gospel movement was. One thing is for certain though: the role of religion in shaping our political climate cannot be denied.
