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2006 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture

Cognition and Religion*

Robert WuthnowPrinceton University

Recent deveiopments inspireà hy cognitive science have significant implications for the sodologi'cal study of religion. Studies in cognitive anthropology and related fields such as neuroscience, cogni-tive psychology, and linguistics clarify the processes by which information is structured, given mean-ing, and remembered. This work provides new concepts and techniques for investigating topics thathave long been central to the study of religion, including cultural schémas, metaphors, and narratives.These topics hold special promise for applications to the study ofreli^ous identity, practice, and expe-rience.

Consider the following: A social scientist conducts a survey of college stu-dents to see whether or not they pray and, if so, what they pray about. He findsthat students usually pray for something mental, such as asking God to help themremember a formula for a test; something emotional, such as coping with stress;or something else relatively intangible, such as "being with" them. They hardlyever pray for anything physical, such as asking God to heal an illness or fix a car.

These results pose an interesting puzzle. Assuming the survey was conductedproperly and the responses are credible, how would one go about making sense ofthese findings? Were one to enlist a panel of social scientists to answer this ques-tion, at least three ideas would probably emerge. First, one could look at the stu-dents' needs. For instance, one might hypothesize that students pray this waybecause they are having more trouble with tests and stress than they are withhealth and cars. Alternatively, it might be that students pray this way becausetheir friends do and they feel a need to belong. Asking questions about students'

*Direct correspondence to: Robert Wuthnow, Department of Sociology, Princeton University,Princeton, NJ 08544 ([email protected]). Support was provided by the ]ohn TempletonFoundation.

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342 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

needs and relationships in the survey would be a good way of testing thesehypotheses. Second, one might look at the context. The idea that America isafflicted with a "therapeutic culture" would be a likely starting point. This ideacould be tested by asking students questions about their exposure to therapeuticideas in psychology classes. Or it might be examined through qualitative infor-mation about cues in the society at large, such as from talk shows on radio andtelevision. Third, one might try to situate the results in history. Secularizationtheory would be a good candidate for doing this. One might argue, for example,that Elijah asked God to bum the altar at Mount Carmel and Cotton Matherasked God to spare people from smallpox; in comparison, the students' vague psy-chological prayers might be considered a poor cousin of such piety. Each of theseapproaches could be interesting, and yet my reason for mentioning them is tosuggest that they leave out something important. What might that be?

As sociological studies of religion have proliferated, an unfortunate conse-quence of this growth has been an increasing sense of insularity both within soci-ology itself and in relation to otber disciplines. In tbe past, innovative scholar-ship occurred through extensive cross-disciplinary borrowing. During the 1960s,for instance, sociology of religion incorporated ideas from other fields that great-ly enhanced its understanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. One thinksespecially of Peter Berger's (1967) arguments about world views and plausibilitystructures that drew from the phenomenological theorizing of Alfred Schutz andArnold Geblen; of Robert Bellab's (1970, 1975) work on civil religion, informedby Rousseau's political theory and Tillich's tbeology; and of the more generalimpact of Clifford Geertz' (1973) writing about religion as a cultural system,Mary Douglas's (1966, 1970) discussions of purity and danger, and Victor Turner's(1969) treatments of ritual and liminality. Much of that work continues to be ofinterest and is frequently the topic of critical inquiries as well as appreciativeapplications (Asad 1993; Ortner 1997; Schilbrack 2005). However, it is also fairto say tbat questions about meaning, symbolism, ritual, identity, and experienceremain sufficiently vague tbat scbolars are sometimes tempted to throw up tbeirhands and focus only on readily quantified topics, sucb as cburcb membersbiprates and attendance at religious services. Geertz' interpretive approach bas beencriticized especially for its apparent lack of rigor (D'Andrade 1995), wbileBerger's empbasis on subjectivity bas prompted similar concerns (Wutbnow1987).

In tbe past few years religion has become a topic of increasing interest toscholars in other fields. Much of this work has been influenced by studies ofhuman cognition. At present, there is relatively little evidence that insights fromthis work are being taken seriously within the sociology of religion (although seeKlassen 2005; and on Durkheim, Bergesen 2004; Hammond 2003). Yet, as I willseek to demonstrate, these new lines of investigation offer ways of advancing ourunderstanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. The point is not that soci-

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ologists should become camp followers of other disciplines. It is rather that selec-tive incorporation and recasting of new ideas can contribute significantly toscholarship within sociology of religion itself.

Mention of neuroscience and cognitive psychology conjures up images of themost controversial—and therefore highly publicized—studies of religion. Thesestudies include books and articles claiming to have identified a "God spot" in thebrain, a spirituality gene, or a neural mechanism coded to seek transcendence(Ashbrook and Albright 1997; Persinger 1983; Schermer 2000; Hamer 2004).Interesting as these claims may be, many of them are only remotely relevant toempirical work in the social sciences. Some are inspired by the same pretensionsthat led earlier scholars—such as Freud (1927) and Frazer (1922)—to believethat they had found the key to explaining the origins of religion (Atran 2002;Boyer 2001; Masuzawa 1993). Other claims are largely theological, viewing evi-dence about cognitive functioning as proof of a divine presence (Peterson 1999)or of a natural human inclination for such presence (Barrett 2004). Furthermore,these studies typically emphasize biology to the point that social scientists findthem reductionistic.

For our purposes, the work of greatest relevance is not that of neuroscientistsbut of social scientists who apply insights about cognition to the study of religion.Work of this kind has flourished over the past several years, led by scholars incognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, religious studies,and philosophy. As preliminary evidence, one need only consider the researchand extensive bibliographies included in such books as Current Approaches in theCognitive Science of Religion (Pyysiainen and Anttonen 2002); Mind and Religion:Psychobgical and Cognitive Fouruiations of Religiosity (Whitehouse and McCauley2005); Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Lawson andMcCauley 1990); Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of CulturalForms (McCauley and Lawson 2002); Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives onReligious Belief, Ritual, and Experience (Andresen 2001); in Cods We Trust: TheEvolutionary Landscape of Religion, Evolution ard Cognition (Atran 2002); andReligion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Boyer 2001). inaddition, numerous articles have appeared in such journals as CognitivePsychobgy, Current Anthropology, the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Trends inCognitive Sciences, and elsewhere.

My aim is not to summarize what can be found in these various books andjournals, but rather to highlight conceptual and methodological insights thatseem to be of greatest usefulness to future work in the sociology of religion. Forconvenience, I will group these contributions under the headings of researchabout schémas, research about metaphors, and research about narratives. Afterdescribing recent developments in scholarship on these topics, each of whichconnects cognition with considerations about culture, I will then discuss impli-cations for the study of religious identity, practice, and experience.


SCHEMAS

Schemas are processing mechanisms that make information meaningful byorganizing its complex and ambiguous features (Mandler 1984; D'Andrade 1995:124; Grow 1996; Brewer 2001). The statement "she cupped her hands" is mean-ingful because of a very simple schema that fills in information not included inthe words themselves. For instance, it is the shape of a cup that matters in thisinstance, not whether it is made of tin or porcelain. How information is processedand classified has long been of interest in sociology. Durkheim's (1915) discussionof the totemic organization of sacred-profane distinctions and Weber's (1978)treatment of soteriological meaning systems are early examples. Schutz's (1970)emphasis on finite provinces of meaning is especially relevant. But interest inschémas has increased in recent years for several reasons. In sociology, the ideathat culture was an underlying societal pattern that necessarily embodied coher-ence has been replaced by a view of culture as a tool kit (Swidler 1986), reper-toire (Tilly 1992), or rag bag (Wuthnow 1996). These newer conceptions of cul-ture emphasize that actors piece together elements to produce coherence (Toobyand Cosmides 1992). In the cognitive sciences, research demonstrates that infor-mation is absorbed piecemeal into various parts of the brain and is then orderedby higher-level "top-down" processing mechanisms (Mast et al. 2003; Dror et al.2005). Both perspectives start with the view that culture is not only vastly com-plex, but also infinitely fungible, and thus pose a central research question: howis coherence achieved?

Whereas neuroscience demonstrates the physical capacity for schema-likeprocessing, research in cognitive psychology and anthropology is concerned withunderstanding the conceptual categories or "domains" that people use to organ-ize and make sense of information (Karmiloff-Smith 1992; Hirschfeld andGelman 1994; Mithen 1998). Several kinds of domains can be distinguished(Pinker 1994; Wellman and Gelman 1997; Gelman 2001). Modules are biologi-cally driven systems concerned largely with perception (such as facial recogni-tion) and other basic skills (such as language acquisition) (Karmiloff-Smith2001). Gonceptual domains are ontological categories that permit us to classifyinformation under meaningful headings such as person, animal, or plant. Folktheories are distinguished from ordinary conceptual domains because theyinclude more elaborate assumptions about aspects of the world like gravity, men-tal states, biology, and social relationships (Atran 1990). Fxpertise domains arealso distinguished because of the highly specialized knowledge they entail (likeplaying chess, for example). Domains carry certain expectations, such as the pre-sumption that an animal can move around and a plant cannot. Domains are thustools, not in the sense sometimes suggested of helping individuals pursue theirself-interested objectives, but in organizing information and implying appropri-ate courses of action. The theory of connectivity suggests that conceptualdomains are determined partly by neural functions and partly by such environ-


mental factors as language and the availability of concepts. Of particular interestto sociologists, domains and broader scbemas are reinforced by institutions andthrough social interaction. DiMaggio (1997) reviews a number of studies show-ing how schémas shape perceptions of events, attention to particular pieces ofinformation, and the likelihood of information being remembered. This researchis an elaboration of the Sapir-Whorf tradition demonstrating that people see andremember what their language predisposes them to see and remember (Carroll1956; Mandelbaum 1949; Lucy 1992). It extends that tradition by showing thatperception is shaped by more than the availability of words alone. So conceived,the implications for understanding religion are nevertheless fairly straightfor-ward: if people learn religious schémas as children, they will attend to the worlddifferently than if they have not. Schemas persist because nothing invalidatesthem.

Recent work in cognitive anthropology focuses more innovatively on the dis-tinctive characteristics of religion. One approach emphasizes the importance ofdomain violations and thus takes the received wisdom in a very different direction(Boyer 1990, 1993, 1994, 1997, 2001). Instead of noting that schémas makeinformation memorable, these studies ask why some schémas are more memo-rable in the first place. Religion is distinctive in this view, rather than simplybeing one instance of something better understood as culture in general. Religionis rooted in cognitive processes that violate the boundaries between ontologicaldomains. For instance, a god that in most ways resembles a person but is assumedto be eternal and omnipresent is clearly a domain violation. Other examplesinclude ghosts, chimeras, superheroes, and virgins who give birth. Domain viola-tions of this kind stand out, and should be especially memorable for this reason,judging from studies of story-response in which incongruous or surprising materi-al generates higher recall (McCabe and Peterson 1990).

Research on category violations has been conducted through experiments inwhich subjects are given made-up stories that include violations similar to thosefound in real-world religions. For instance, Boyer and Ramble (2001) asked sub-jects to read a story about a fictional ambassador-in-training preparing for a tripto another galaxy by visiting a museum where he encountered 24 exhibits. Someof the exhibits were synchronous with ordinary domains (furniture that could bemoved by pushing it), while others involved domain breaches (furniture thatfloated in the air). After reading the story and spending time on a distractionactivity (involving mental calculations), subjects were asked to write down asmany of the exhibits as they could remember. Subjects also filled out question-naires asking if each exhibit was something they would encounter in reality andhad encountered in films, stories, or cartoons. The results showed significantlyhigher recall for the items involving category violations than for the synchronousitems. Additional experiments produced similar results for different kinds ofdomain violations and in other societies, and suggested that recall is highestwhen violations are "normalized" (i.e., are partly in a recognizable domain).


The fact that religious ideas are perpetuated by institutions as well as hy cer-tain capacities of the brain is the key to introducing considerations about cultur-al variations in religion. Emphasizing category violations means paying particu-lar attention to the agentic or anthropomorphic characteristics of suprahumanbeings as opposed to, for instance, regarding religion as a vague sense of thesacred or a conception of transcendence. Suprahuman agents have qualities andengage in activities that cross schematic boundaries. They are "like us" in somerespects and different from us in others. These similarities and differences arethus particularly important for understanding the perceived relationshipsbetween selves and divine others—which now permits us to return to the earlierexample of college students' prayers.

Missing from the possible studies I mentioned earlier that would focus on stu-dents' needs, contexts, and history is anything about the prayers themselves. I donot mean that a student muttering "God help me" points to a rich text that onemight analyze. I mean that in uttering such a prayer a student is deploying cer-tain thoughts about his or her relationship to God and God's attributes. Knowingsomething about these thoughts is a way to shed new light on the topic of prayer.The argument would go something like this: praying to a suprahuman agent is adomain violation. It involves assuming that the agent is enough like us to listenand yet different from us in not being visible and having powers that exceedthose of humans.-A violation of this kind may in the long haul of evolutionarytime be memorable and thus enduring, but in the present era it strains credibili-ty. For this reason, people who pray bring schémas to the act that they havelearned in ordinary life. One such schema reflects what we have learned aboutthe physical world. If I am going to push a child in a swing, I have to be physi-cally present and exert force on the swing. To drive a nail, I have to hit it with ahammer. But when it comes to emotions, a different schema should be applied.A child learns that grandma loves her, even though grandma may live a thousandmiles away. I can "feel" the comfort and security associated with having a spouse,even at a distance.

If these schémas from ordinary life influence students' thinking when theypray, then the following hypothesis emerges: Students resolve the domain viola-tion of praying to a God who seems far away by asking only for the kinds of emo-tions that they could imagine in a similar human relationship; they refrain fromasking for physical benefits that in ordinary life would require someone to bepresent. But how might one test this hypothesis?

Justin L. Barrett (2001), the social scientist who surveyed students abouttheir prayers and formulated the hypothesis about schema effects, found that hecould test the hypothesis by designing experiments in which students respondedto fictional stories about suprahuman agents. The stories identically put the read-er in a distressing spot where help of some kind was needed but differed in thatone asked about imploring a distant all-powerful being for help, a second sug-


gested the presence of an all-powerful supercomputer, and the third posited theexistence of Superman. In the first situation, subjects were more likely to say theywould pray for psychological help, whereas in the other two, they were more like-ly to ask for physical help. Thus, the hypothesis about distance seemed to be con-firmed. In other studies, Barrett experimented with different schémas (Barrett2002a, 2002b). For instance, in one study subjects were given stories about a"smart god," who could read people's minds, or a "dumb god," who could not, andasked questions about the efficacy of various rituals for appeasing the god. Forsmart gods, it mattered that the right person performed the ritual, whereas fordumb gods, it was more important that the ritual be performed correctly. Thepoint: good intentions matter only when gods are capable of discerning thoseintentions.

The observations I want to draw from these examples, however, have less todo with their specific substantive conclusions than with larger conceptual andmethodological implications. First, texts become an important source of infor-mation because tbey provide descriptions—real or hypothetical—of suprahumanagents' behavior. This point is worth emphasizing. Cognition is concerned withmental functioning, but is manifested in cultural objects. If one were to studyprayer or beliefs about God, clearly it makes sense to consider examining texts inwbich prayers and beliefs appear. The implication of research on schémas, more-over, is that what the texts do not say may be as important as wbat they do say.Second, controlled experimental designs are a useful method for eliciting sub-jects' responses to texts, as opposed to merely examining texts by themselves.Subjects' responses are especially helpful for determining how cognitive cate-gories influence what is perceived and remembered. Third, the prevalence withwhich people claim to believe in a god, angels, answers to prayer, and divine rev-elation suggests tbat researcb focusing on tbe attributes of these agents is a mean-ingful way of understanding religion. And fourth, such research can usefully beguided by probing tbe kinds of mental categories tbat people employ, such asstandard distinctions between near and far, smart and dumb, or weak and power-ful.

METAPHORS

Research on metaphors is closely related to work on schémas. Whereas stud-ies of schémas emphasize the distinctions among domains, metaphors involvebringing togetber seemingly different cognitive elements, in doing so, metaphorsnot only compare but also attribute tbe cbaracteristics of one category to theother ("my daughter is an angel"). Metaphors are a familiar feature of religiousdiscourse ("the Lord is my shepherd," "in my father's house are many mansions").Some are colorfully poetic ("my love is a rose"), but metaphors are better under-


Stood as ordinary ways of "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing interms of another" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5; Glucksberg 2001; Rohrer 2001).Many incorporate words from the physical domain ("I'm feeling doum," "she's anupstanding citizen"), while others mingle ideas from different conceptualdomains. War images are common ("he shot down my argument," "evangelicalsfeel embattled"). Body imagery is also prevalent ("she's thin skinned," "histhoughts are penetrating"), especially in religious discourse ("the church is thebody of Christ"), and of course figures importantly in the theoretical writing ofMary Douglas (1966, 1970) and more recently in various empirical studies (Orsi1985, 2005; Griffith 2004; Klassen 2001).

Despite its prominence in religious discourse, metaphor is often overlookedas a topic for scholarly investigation. In the interest of reducing religion to alatent subjective variable, researchers focus on belief in God or frequency ofprayer, rather than examining the rich metaphoric language that shapes how peo-ple think about God and prayer. Lakoff's (2002) comparison of "strict father" and"nurturant parent" morality illustrates how metaphors shape meaning. Strictfathers are like God, and God is like a strict father. The strict father lovingly dis-ciplines his children to make them strong enough to resist the dangers lurking inthe world. Moral strength is like physical strength; it has to be built up throughexercise and it keeps one from stumbling and falling. In contrast, the nurturantparent is an empathie figure characterized less by vertical than by horizontalmetaphors (such as "walking in one's shoes"). Nurturant parent metaphors aremore likely to include female as well as male images ("being fed," "cradled"). Godis a "lover" instead of a "king" and found "in community" instead of "above."

Although nearly any concept can be paired with any other, research on thecognitive patterning of metaphors demonstrates recurring rules and variations.One is that metaphors do not only reflect cognitive domains, but rather defineand reinforce them. Metaphors are essentially symbols of inclusion and exclu-sion. Spatial metaphors provide the clearest examples; one feels "close" to afriend, but "distant" from an enemy. Being "in the loop" contrasts with feeling"out of touch." Metaphors are thus important discursive clues in the study of"symbolic boundaries" and "boundary work" (Lamont and Foumier 1992;Lamont and Molnar 2002; Gieryn 1983, 1995, 1999). A second regularity is thatmetaphors are grounded in available social experience ("your brain is hard-wired") and thus serve valuably in interpreting the connections between mean-ings and social contexts (Damton 1984 remains a masterful example). Variationsemerge from these basic rules of metaphoric construction. The contrasts impliedin metaphors are especially interesting. Some emphasize irreconcilable differ-ences between "black" and "white," while others describe "shades of gray,""blurred lines," and "coming together." Variations in the strength of boundariesare also implied by redundancy (repetition of the same metaphor) and coinci-dence (parallels suggested by different metaphors). Yet another important varia-


tion concerns the concreteness of metaphoric elements. For instance, thosedrawn from the physical and biological domains ("up," "down," "push," "shove,""father," "son") are more concrete than those from the psychological domain("feeling," "ponder," "care"). Thus, in Lakoff's analysis of strict father and nurtu-rant parent metaphors, the former includes more tangible referents than the lat-ter.

The fact that metaphors typically imply normative evaluations is especiallypertinent to their role in religion. Metaphors signal the moral messages commu-nicated in religious discourse. Moses goes up to receive the Ten Commandmentsand comes doum to find the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, and people"grow" and "fall away" in their faith. Besides the moral valences associated withsuch simple contrasts, religious discourse includes interpellations (Althusser1969, 1972) that produce moral symmetry. When Adam falls from grace, Jesuscomes as the "second Adam" to bring humanity back into a state of grace.Arithmetic metaphors are one of the most common ways of achieving balance inmoral arguments. A loss has to be compensated; if a person (or God) makes a sac-rifice, then some effort has to be expended to balance the ledger. The personhelped must help someone else; the home of origin an immigrant loses must bemade up for by the perception that the new home is a land of opportunity; anunmistakable tragedy means that survivors should look for a blessing (someexamples are given in Wuthnow 2006).

NARRATIVES

Narratives are more elaborate than schémas and metaphors. Cognitiveresearch suggests that narratives are not simply the playful obsession of peoplewho like stories; narratives are one of the most important schémas humans use toorganize information (Herman 2003). Narratives impose meaning on behaviorand experiences by identifying a relevant starting point, describing an interimevent, and depicting an end state that differs from the initial state and is in someway explained by what happens in between (Bal 1998; Franzosi 1998). The tem-poral aspect of narratives is a crucial topic for cognitive inquiry. For instance,Gerulo (1998) shows that the sequencing of elements in narratives about vio-lence is a key factor in whether violence is perceived to be right or wrong.Narratives are of particular interest to scholars of religion. Sacred texts are typi-cally composed of narratives, and much of the ordinary content of religions—ser-mons, prayers, testimonials, tracts—also takes a narrative form (Stromberg1993). In addition, researchers themselves frequently elicit narratives, especiallythrough qualitative interviews.

Narratives can be analyzed through different lenses and for different purpos-es. Bearman and Stoval (2004) argue that narratives can be likened to networks.


with each event being regarded as a node, and the connections among theseevents described as arcs. Doing this provides a way of graphically mapping thestructure of a narrative, showing the temporal sequence of events and their per-ceived association. Different accounts involving some of the same events canthen be compared. For instance. Smith (2005) uses this method to compare theaccounts of people in two different ethnic groups about a major historic event intheir community. She finds that one group told stories with many connectionsorganized around a few central events, while the other group remembered hard-ly any of the same events.

Thinking of narratives as networks of elements and connections leads tohypotheses about the relative durability of various stories. Culture-producinginstitutions, such as churches and schools, perpetuate narratives by repeatingaccounts of particularly central events. In Smith's (2005) study, for instance,respondents in the ethnic group with clearer memories frequently reportedaccounts that they had learned in school or heard on television. Durability alsodepends on the density of linkages among elements. It has been argued, for exam-ple, that the longevity of the Brothers' Grimm fairy tales lies partly in the factthat the stories contain relatively few central characters or events and can beelaborated in a variety of ways (Grimm and Grimm 2004). As a different exam-ple, an application of matrix theory suggests that a loosely coupled system of ele-ments is likely to be more stable than one in which an adjustment to one neces-sitates adjustments to all the others. Thus, a fundamentalist belief system thatemphasizes a few core tenets but denies that any can be logically or rationallyrelated to the others is likely to endure longer than a belief system that insists onall teachings being systematically related (Wuthnow 1987).

Conceiving of narratives as nodes and arcs is clearly an oversimplification.For instance, if a woman reports that she and her husband went to church to pray,is the event best described as a couple going, two different people going, a womanjoining her husband and then going, going to church and going to pray, prayingat church, or something else? In short, mapping procedures need to be theoreti'cally driven and thus careful in determining whether sequences, relations amongactors, activities, moods, locations, or other aspects are the most important. Inaddition, a distinction needs to be made between the Storni (including all ele-ments internal to the story) and the discourse in which the story is presented(Young 2005). Discourse in this sense is the evidence available in the text itselfor in related materials about how the story was generated. It is the metanarrativein which the story itself appears. In a qualitative interview, it is the fact that thestory is being told to an interviewer and in response to a question. Less obvious-ly, the metanarrative also includes clues about the origins and intent of a story.For instance, Witten's (1995) analysis of Protestant sermons showed numerousexamples of clergy including stories about themselves that helped to establishtheir authority by showing them answering people's questions.


IDENTITY, PRACTICE, AND EXPERIENCE

Thus far, I have mentioned ways in which cognitive studies of schémas,metaphors, and narratives pertain generally to religion. Many of these examplesfocus on thought about suprahuman agents. These agents, however, also serve asinteraction partners with human persons. How people think about themselvesraises important sociological questions about the construction of personal identi-ty. Interest in the religious aspects of identity is evident in studies of conversion,loyalty to religious communities, consequential internalization of religiousnorms, and spiritual journeys. Questions about identity have become increasing-ly interesting in light of evidence that people construct or select self-under-standings in relation to multiple religious options (Roof 1999; Wuthnow 1998).How people come to have a particular identity is often examined in one of twoways: the rational actor perspective asserts that people make choices to maximizetheir self interest (Stark and Finke 2000), while the embedded actor perspectiveargues that these choices are a reflection of the values of those with whom oneassociates. Both approaches have been criticized on grounds that they leave theindividual actor as an unexamined black box. Yet the challenge remains in howto open this box. If narratives and metaphors are the schémas through whichactors make sense of their experience, then they provide important information.How they are organized serves as a connection between the individual and thecultural influences shaping interpretations of individual experience.

Several kinds of narratives can be distinguished. Accounts tell why and howa person arrived at a particular state of affairs, such as becoming a stock broker orjoining a commune (Scott and Lyman 1968; Orbuch 1997). Stories recount aparticular episode, like a chance encounter with a friend, and may illustrate anaspect of an account but usually are not in themselves a full account (Genette1980). Life stories are personal narratives that integrate many different accountsand stories (Linde 1993; McAdams 1993; Smith and Watson 2001). Gore narra-tives are distillations from life stories that selectively emphasize an important orcentral thread of experience, such as one's quest for excellence or fear of thefuture (Wuthnow 1998). Finally, so-called grand or master narratives are schol-arly renditions of popular myths that involve the repetitious telling of storiesabout a social entity; American civil religion and progressive socialism would beexamples (Smith 2003). Self narratives relate to and incorporate elements fromthese grand narratives concerning the society in which one lives.

Paying close attention to the wording of personal narratives can provideimportant clues about cultural understandings of the self, which in turn shapehow spirituality is located in relation to the self. Goffman (1959) and morerecently Gergen (1991), among others, have argued that the contemporary self ismulti-faceted or "multiphrenic," meaning that it permits people to hold seem-ingly contradictory beliefs—about God, science, self-interest, altruism, and the


like—with relative ease. Standard research on cognitive schémas has paid littleattention to this kind of complexity, but narrative multivocality or heteroglossia(Bakhtin 1981) is an indication of how multiphrenic selves resolve such tensions.Multivocality parses discourse in separate speech domains and thereby permitsdifferent parts of the self to reflect on one another, to speak with different voic-es, and thus to assert something with one breath and qualify it with another(Wuthnow 1991). For instance, a person may describe his beliefs about God intbis way: "I guess I do believe, although, like my father used to say, 'Maybe Godis just in my imagination'—but I think that's probably too harsh." The commentregisters an internal dialogue and a part of the self that seeks to correct an asser-tion made by a different part. Tbis is quite different from the respondents inSmith's (2005) study who, having largely been reared under totalitarian rule,reported what they had learned in school or from their parents but never indi-cated disagreeing witb it.

The role of cognition in religious practice is another topic ripe for investiga-tion. The concept of practice has proven increasingly attractive in discussions ofreligion, as well as in sociology more generally, because it emphasizes the learnedand sequential character of action instead of treating acts as discrete elements ofbehavior (Maclntyre 1984; Stout 1988; Wuthnow 1998; Bourdieu 1977). Thedifference can be illustrated in research about prayer. If praying is a discrete act,then one can be satisfied counting its frequency over the course of a typical weekor year. If praying is a practice, then it becomes important to know about its his-tory: when it was first learned, whether it is still being performed in tbe same way,and tbe iterative effects of perceiving that one's prayers have or have not beenanswered. Tbe idea of practice is thus a schema that affects how the componentacts involved in prayer are organized.

Considerations about metaphor provide a reminder that religious practicesare often interpreted—by tbose who engage in them and by those who studythem—metaphorically. For instance, Bourdieu (1984) associates practice withhabitus and thus gives it a connotation of being tbe familiar "same-old, same-old,"whereas Stout (1988) and Maclntyre (1984) liken practice to soccer, chess, andother games, thus emphasizing competition, skill, and mastery. The previouslymentioned concept of expertise domains points to the value of likening religiouspractice to other skills. Some of these practices are suspected of reinforcing par-ticular cognitive patterns. Meditation and sustained involvement in altruisticbebavior are two examples.

The relevance of cognition to studies of religious practice is also evident inquestions that have gained prominence in recent years about what exactly makesa practice "religious" (Asad 1993; Tweed 2005). These questions arise especiallyin studies seeking to learn whether "religion" matters in nonreligious contexts.For instance. Bender (2003) studied ordinary discourse at a soup kitchen to seewhen and how religious topics (such as God or church going) appeared. Prayer


would be an interesting topic of investigation for similar purposes. The state-ment, "she is praying," invokes a schema unique even among other statementsthat might be deemed "religious." For instance, it is possible to say that a person"worships money," but not that a person prays to money.

How practices change is a related topic of considerable interest. In responseto simplistic arguments about whether conventional religious practices aredeclining or holding steady, for instance. Berger (1998) has suggested that a qual-itative shift in the meaning of spirituality has taken place. But how would one testthat assertion? One way would be to examine the metaphors used to describe spir-ituality in different eras. For example, in my work on spirituality in the UnitedStates since the 1950s, I found that earlier metaphors emphasized place, location,dwellings, homes, and families, whereas more recent metaphors emphasized jour-neys, movement, change, and temporality (Wuthnow 1998).

Another aspect of religious practice that is of continuing interest is religion'spotential for limiting socially destructive behavior (such as crime or adultery).Standard formulations focus on moral rules in religious texts (such as the TenCommandments). Emphasis on rules leads to a bias that regards religion primari-ly as a utilitarian system of rewards and punishments. Sociologically, a moreinteresting line of inquiry emerges when one asks about the significance of reli-gion's proposition that supernatural agents have unlimited access to one's ownand others' thoughts. Following Cooley's (1922) familiar "looking glass" argu-

' ment, individuals adjust their behavior according to how they believe others per-ceive them. Yet the fact that one person never knows for sure what another per-son is thinking raises two problems: being able to act in a way that intentionallydeceives someone else, and failing despite good intentions to live up to anotherperson's expectations. Deception and well-intentioned nonconformity opendoors for self-interested, asocial, or socially maladaptive behavior and thus poseproblems in their own right. In addition, though, intentions themselves matter.The sense of moral order that holds a society together rests not only on goodbehavior, but also on good intentions (for instance, donating to charity for the"right reasons"). Judgments about intentions permit similar actions to be evalu-ated differently. They also permit "accidents" to be excused. An omniscientsupernatural being with knowledge of intentions thus performs an importantsocial function (Bering and Johnson 2005). A divine rule has power not onlybecause violators might be punished but also because people assume that it isbased on perfect knowledge. Individuals monitor their behavior but also thethoughts that might lead them to negative behavior. In addition, individualsassume that others do the same.

Yet another implication of what we have considered is that the sharp dis-tinction that is often drawn between practice (behavior) and belief (non-behav-ior) collapses. The reason is that practice typically involves utterances ("1 pro-nounce you man and wife") and ritual that is or can be inscribed in texts, while

354 SOGIOLOGY OF RELIGION

belief (insofar as it can be observed) also takes the form of ideas about relation-ships and actions. The religious world is, as Orsi (2005) has argued, populated bygods, saints, heroes, ancestors, and other special beings, and it is a social world inwhich these beings and ordinary humans enter into relationships with oneanother. Ironically, then, an interest in cognition as something presumably "inhere," leads to a focus on the structures and patterns among the observable ema-nations of cognition. These structures and patterns are evident in speech and ges-tures that make up ritual action, in the stories told through these rituals, and inthe narratives recorded in sacred texts, personal anecdotes, interviews, and news-paper accounts. It is for this reason that discussions of culture more broadlyincreasingly focus on discourse.

The relevance of cognitive approaches to the study of religious experiencecan be suggested by briefly mentioning three implications. First, it is probably safeto say that one of the tensions between mainstream studies of religion and cog-nitive approaches is the fact that religion often involves deep emotion, whereascognition seems to stack the decks in favor of purely rational or mentalistic per-spectives. However, cognitive studies increasingly demonstrate the conditionsunder which affective regions of the brain dominate rational processing activi-ties. For instance, research on moral reasoning (Moll et al. 2002a, 2002b) showsthat difficult moral dilemmas activate parts of the brain that govern emotionsmore than parts dealing with rational thought. Second, cognitive studies increas-ingly document the extent to which mental frameworks influence perception.For instance, fMRI research on subjects under hypnosis shows that higher-orderprocessing mechanisms are blocked and thus permit subjects literally to perceiveinformation differently than they ordinarily do (Blakeslee 2005). Yet researchalso points to the limits of arguments claiming that perception is entirely shapedby larger frameworks. For instance, the famous argument that Brahe and Keplersaw the sun differently because of their different theories of the solar system hasbeen credibly refuted on grounds that the experience of seeing the sun "rise" isrooted in a physical schema that cannot be overridden by theoretical knowledge(Gerhart and Russell 2004). Thus, questions remain about the extent to whichexperiences of ecstasy or transcendence do or do not depend on interpretiveframeworks. And third, deep emotion—whether experienced directly or pre-served in texts and other secondary accounts—becomes an important marker innarratives. As Collins (2004) has argued, rituals have special significance insocial life because they induce and commemorate times of great individual andcollective emotion. Neuroimaging studies suggest that memories of emotion-laden experiences (such as religious or sexual experiences) generate brain pat-terns remarkably similar to those evident when events are experienced for thefirst time (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Religious rituals and texts that remind peo-ple of a time of grief, redemption, or special joy may, therefore, be even morepowerful than sometimes assumed.


CONCLUSIONS

For sociology of religion, recent developments in cognitive studies under-score the importance of studying religion as cultural practice and point toward anew way of thinking about culture. Schemas, metaphors, narratives, identities,practices, and experiences become culture the moment they are observed bysomeone else. At that moment, they are no longer private ruminations or men-tal images but public. They reflect cognitive processes. Yet they do not requiresociology to become psychology any more than the physical properties of DNArequire neuroscientists to become physicists. As greater knowledge of cognitionis gained, the manner in which culture is investigated nevertheless changes. Thecurrent shift might be likened to the transformation in language studies fromphilology to generative grammar. This transition entailed focusing less on thesubstantive content of language and more on the rules by which language wasconstructed. Studies of culture are now shifting in the same way. Increasingattention is being paid to the rules through which culture is constructed. Thatculture is constructed is no longer the issue. How it is constructed has become theimportant question. Moreover, the idea of rules also changes. Cognitive studiesshow that children do not learn to use language appropriately by literally learn-ing and then deploying hundreds of grammatical rules. Instead, complex schémasprovide instantaneous cues about what to say. The application to studies of reli-gion lies in the fact that religious beliefs and practices are enormously complexand variable—so much so that purely descriptive studies produce informationthat rapidly becomes too vast to assimilate. Looking at the processes that under-lie this complexity is the essential next step for heuristic reasons alone.

In this transition, the standard tools of investigation are not fundamentallychanged. As suggested in my earlier example, surveys remain useful as sources ofinformation about general tendencies and variations within populations.Controlled experiments may again find greater use in sociology, especially as sur-veys become increasingly expensive and subject to intractable sampling andresponse biases. With digitization, textual analysis becomes especially attractive.Interview transcripts, newspaper articles, blogs, sermons, and even historicalmanuscripts all become valuable sources of information. These are the materialspeople generate when they think.

In concluding, it is important to remember that the best work in sociologyhas always paid attention to questions about cognition. One has only to recallMead's (1932) writing about the mind, Schutz's (1970) important but often neg-lected essays on the cognitive setting of the life-world. Parsons' (1951) fascina-tion with cybernetics, Levi-Strauss's (1973) interest in the so-called savage mind,Geertz's (1973) indebtedness to Ryle, and Bellah's (1970) uses of Bruner's workon cognitive development to see the connections. What I have tried to describehere are a few of the ways in which the connections with cognitive science mayagain be opening new lines of inquiry.

3 5 6 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

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