Sodoog5i o/Religion 2QQ7,

2006 Paul Hanly Furfey Lecture Cognition and Religion*

Robert Wuthnow
Princeton University

Recent deveiopments inspire hy cognitive science have significant implications for the sodologi' cal study of religion. Studies in cognitive anthropology and relatedfieldssuch as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and linguistics clarify the processes by which information is structured, given meaning, and remembered. This work provides new concepts and techniques for investigating topics that have long been central to the study of religion, including cultural schmas, metaphors, and narratives. These topics hold special promise for applications to the study ofreli^ous identity, practice, and experience.

Consider the following: A social scientist conducts a survey of college students to see whether or not they pray and, if so, what they pray about. He finds that students usually pray for something mental, such as asking God to help them remember a formula for a test; something emotional, such as coping with stress; or something else relatively intangible, such as "being with" them. They hardly ever 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 conducted properly and the responses are credible, how would one go about making sense of these findings? Were one to enlist a panel of social scientists to answer this question, at least three ideas would probably emerge. First, one could look at the students' needs. For instance, one might hypothesize that students pray this way because they are having more trouble with tests and stress than they are with health and cars. Alternatively, it might be that students pray this way because their 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 (wuthnow@princeton.edu). Support was provided by the ]ohn Templeton Foundation.

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342 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION needs and relationships in the survey would be a good way of testing these hypotheses. Second, one might look at the context. The idea that America is afflicted with a "therapeutic culture" would be a likely starting point. This idea could be tested by asking students questions about their exposure to therapeutic ideas in psychology classes. Or it might be examined through qualitative information about cues in the society at large, such as from talk shows on radio and television. Third, one might try to situate the results in history. Secularization theory 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 Mather asked God to spare people from smallpox; in comparison, the students' vague psychological prayers might be considered a poor cousin of such piety. Each of these approaches could be interesting, and yet my reason for mentioning them is to suggest that they leave out something important. What might that be? As sociological studies of religion have proliferated, an unfortunate consequence of this growth has been an increasing sense of insularity both within sociology itself and in relation to otber disciplines. In tbe past, innovative scholarship occurred through extensive cross-disciplinary borrowing. During the 1960s, for instance, sociology of religion incorporated ideas from other fields that greatly enhanced its understanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. One thinks especially of Peter Berger's (1967) arguments about world views and plausibility structures that drew from the phenomenological theorizing of Alfred Schutz and Arnold Geblen; of Robert Bellab's (1970, 1975) work on civil religion, informed by Rousseau's political theory and Tillich's tbeology; and of the more general impact 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 of interest and is frequently the topic of critical inquiries as well as appreciative applications (Asad 1993; Ortner 1997; Schilbrack 2005). However, it is also fair to say tbat questions about meaning, symbolism, ritual, identity, and experience remain sufficiently vague tbat scbolars are sometimes tempted to throw up tbeir hands and focus only on readily quantified topics, sucb as cburcb membersbip rates and attendance at religious services. Geertz' interpretive approach bas been criticized especially for its apparent lack of rigor (D'Andrade 1995), wbile Berger's empbasis on subjectivity bas prompted similar concerns (Wutbnow 1987). In tbe past few years religion has become a topic of increasing interest to scholars in other fields. Much of this work has been influenced by studies of human cognition. At present, there is relatively little evidence that insights from this work are being taken seriously within the sociology of religion (although see Klassen 2005; and on Durkheim, Bergesen 2004; Hammond 2003). Yet, as I will seek to demonstrate, these new lines of investigation offer ways of advancing our understanding of the cultural dimensions of religion. The point is not that soci-

COGNITION AND RELIGION 343 ologists should become camp followers of other disciplines. It is rather that selective incorporation and recasting of new ideas can contribute significantly to scholarship within sociology of religion itself. Mention of neuroscience and cognitive psychology conjures up images of the most controversialand therefore highly publicizedstudies of religion. These studies include books and articles claiming to have identified a "God spot" in the brain, 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 to empirical work in the social sciences. Some are inspired by the same pretensions that led earlier scholarssuch as Freud (1927) and Frazer (1922)to believe that they had found the key to explaining the origins of religion (Atran 2002; Boyer 2001; Masuzawa 1993). Other claims are largely theological, viewing evidence 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 find them reductionistic. For our purposes, the work of greatest relevance is not that of neuroscientists but 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 in cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, linguistics, religious studies, and philosophy. As preliminary evidence, one need only consider the research and extensive bibliographies included in such books as Current Approaches in the
Cognitive Science of Religion (Pyysiainen and Anttonen 2002); Mind and Religion: Psychobgical and Cognitive Fouruiations of Religiosity (Whitehouse and McCauley 2005); Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture (Lawson and McCauley 1990); Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (McCauley and Lawson 2002); Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience (Andresen 2001); in Cods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, Evolution ard Cognition (Atran 2002); and Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (Boyer 2001). in

addition, numerous articles have appeared in such journals as Cognitive

Psychobgy, Current Anthropology, the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and elsewhere.

My aim is not to summarize what can be found in these various books and journals, but rather to highlight conceptual and methodological insights that seem to be of greatest usefulness to future work in the sociology of religion. For convenience, I will group these contributions under the headings of research about schmas, research about metaphors, and research about narratives. After describing recent developments in scholarship on these topics, each of which connects cognition with considerations about culture, I will then discuss implications for the study of religious identity, practice, and experience.

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SCHEMAS Schemas are processing mechanisms that make information meaningful by organizing its complex and ambiguous features (Mandler 1984; D'Andrade 1995: 124; Grow 1996; Brewer 2001). The statement "she cupped her hands" is meaningful because of a very simple schema that fills in information not included in the words themselves. For instance, it is the shape of a cup that matters in this instance, not whether it is made of tin or porcelain. How information is processed and classified has long been of interest in sociology. Durkheim's (1915) discussion of 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 in schmas has increased in recent years for several reasons. In sociology, the idea that culture was an underlying societal pattern that necessarily embodied coherence has been replaced by a view of culture as a tool kit (Swidler 1986), repertoire (Tilly 1992), or rag bag (Wuthnow 1996). These newer conceptions of culture emphasize that actors piece together elements to produce coherence (Tooby and Cosmides 1992). In the cognitive sciences, research demonstrates that information is absorbed piecemeal into various parts of the brain and is then ordered by 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 complex, but also infinitely fungible, and thus pose a central research question: how is coherence achieved? Whereas neuroscience demonstrates the physical capacity for schema-like processing, research in cognitive psychology and anthropology is concerned with understanding the conceptual categories or "domains" that people use to organize and make sense of information (Karmiloff-Smith 1992; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; Mithen 1998). Several kinds of domains can be distinguished (Pinker 1994; Wellman and Gelman 1997; Gelman 2001). Modules are biologically driven systems concerned largely with perception (such as facial recognition) and other basic skills (such as language acquisition) (Karmiloff-Smith 2001). Gonceptual domains are ontological categories that permit us to classify information under meaningful headings such as person, animal, or plant. Folk theories are distinguished from ordinary conceptual domains because they include more elaborate assumptions about aspects of the world like gravity, mental states, biology, and social relationships (Atran 1990). Fxpertise domains are also distinguished because of the highly specialized knowledge they entail (like playing chess, for example). Domains carry certain expectations, such as the presumption that an animal can move around and a plant cannot. Domains are thus tools, not in the sense sometimes suggested of helping individuals pursue their self-interested objectives, but in organizing information and implying appropriate courses of action. The theory of connectivity suggests that conceptual domains are determined partly by neural functions and partly by such environ-

COGNITION AND RELIGION 345 mental factors as language and the availability of concepts. Of particular interest to sociologists, domains and broader scbemas are reinforced by institutions and through social interaction. DiMaggio (1997) reviews a number of studies showing how schmas shape perceptions of events, attention to particular pieces of information, and the likelihood of information being remembered. This research is an elaboration of the Sapir-Whorf tradition demonstrating that people see and remember what their language predisposes them to see and remember (Carroll 1956; Mandelbaum 1949; Lucy 1992). It extends that tradition by showing that perception is shaped by more than the availability of words alone. So conceived, the implications for understanding religion are nevertheless fairly straightforward: if people learn religious schmas as children, they will attend to the world differently than if they have not. Schemas persist because nothing invalidates them. Recent work in cognitive anthropology focuses more innovatively on the distinctive characteristics of religion. One approach emphasizes the importance of domain violations and thus takes the received wisdom in a very different direction (Boyer 1990, 1993, 1994, 1997, 2001). Instead of noting that schmas make information memorable, these studies ask why some schmas are more memorable in the first place. Religion is distinctive in this view, rather than simply being one instance of something better understood as culture in general. Religion is rooted in cognitive processes that violate the boundaries between ontological domains. For instance, a god that in most ways resembles a person but is assumed to be eternal and omnipresent is clearly a domain violation. Other examples include ghosts, chimeras, superheroes, and virgins who give birth. Domain violations of this kind stand out, and should be especially memorable for this reason, judging from studies of story-response in which incongruous or surprising material generates higher recall (McCabe and Peterson 1990). Research on category violations has been conducted through experiments in which subjects are given made-up stories that include violations similar to those found in real-world religions. For instance, Boyer and Ramble (2001) asked subjects to read a story about a fictional ambassador-in-training preparing for a trip to another galaxy by visiting a museum where he encountered 24 exhibits. Some of the exhibits were synchronous with ordinary domains (furniture that could be moved by pushing it), while others involved domain breaches (furniture that floated in the air). After reading the story and spending time on a distraction activity (involving mental calculations), subjects were asked to write down as many of the exhibits as they could remember. Subjects also filled out questionnaires asking if each exhibit was something they would encounter in reality and had encountered in films, stories, or cartoons. The results showed significantly higher recall for the items involving category violations than for the synchronous items. Additional experiments produced similar results for different kinds of domain violations and in other societies, and suggested that recall is highest when violations are "normalized" (i.e., are partly in a recognizable domain).

346 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION The fact that religious ideas are perpetuated by institutions as well as hy certain capacities of the brain is the key to introducing considerations about cultural variations in religion. Emphasizing category violations means paying particular attention to the agentic or anthropomorphic characteristics of suprahuman beings as opposed to, for instance, regarding religion as a vague sense of the sacred or a conception of transcendence. Suprahuman agents have qualities and engage in activities that cross schematic boundaries. They are "like us" in some respects and different from us in others. These similarities and differences are thus particularly important for understanding the perceived relationships between selves and divine otherswhich now permits us to return to the earlier example of college students' prayers. Missing from the possible studies I mentioned earlier that would focus on students' needs, contexts, and history is anything about the prayers themselves. I do not mean that a student muttering "God help me" points to a rich text that one might analyze. I mean that in uttering such a prayer a student is deploying certain thoughts about his or her relationship to God and God's attributes. Knowing something 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 a domain violation. It involves assuming that the agent is enough like us to listen and yet different from us in not being visible and having powers that exceed those of humans.-A violation of this kind may in the long haul of evolutionary time be memorable and thus enduring, but in the present era it strains credibility. For this reason, people who pray bring schmas to the act that they have learned in ordinary life. One such schema reflects what we have learned about the physical world. If I am going to push a child in a swing, I have to be physically present and exert force on the swing. To drive a nail, I have to hit it with a hammer. 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 thousand miles away. I can "feel" the comfort and security associated with having a spouse, even at a distance. If these schmas from ordinary life influence students' thinking when they pray, then the following hypothesis emerges: Students resolve the domain violation of praying to a God who seems far away by asking only for the kinds of emotions that they could imagine in a similar human relationship; they refrain from asking for physical benefits that in ordinary life would require someone to be present. But how might one test this hypothesis? Justin L. Barrett (2001), the social scientist who surveyed students about their prayers and formulated the hypothesis about schema effects, found that he could test the hypothesis by designing experiments in which students responded to fictional stories about suprahuman agents. The stories identically put the reader in a distressing spot where help of some kind was needed but differed in that one asked about imploring a distant all-powerful being for help, a second sug-

COGNITION AND RELIGION 347 gested the presence of an all-powerful supercomputer, and the third posited the existence of Superman. In the first situation, subjects were more likely to say they would pray for psychological help, whereas in the other two, they were more likely to ask for physical help. Thus, the hypothesis about distance seemed to be confirmed. In other studies, Barrett experimented with different schmas (Barrett 2002a, 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, and asked questions about the efficacy of various rituals for appeasing the god. For smart gods, it mattered that the right person performed the ritual, whereas for dumb gods, it was more important that the ritual be performed correctly. The point: good intentions matter only when gods are capable of discerning those intentions. The observations I want to draw from these examples, however, have less to do with their specific substantive conclusions than with larger conceptual and methodological implications. First, texts become an important source of information because tbey provide descriptionsreal or hypotheticalof suprahuman agents' behavior. This point is worth emphasizing. Cognition is concerned with mental functioning, but is manifested in cultural objects. If one were to study prayer or beliefs about God, clearly it makes sense to consider examining texts in wbich prayers and beliefs appear. The implication of research on schmas, moreover, 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 subjects' responses to texts, as opposed to merely examining texts by themselves. Subjects' responses are especially helpful for determining how cognitive categories influence what is perceived and remembered. Third, the prevalence with which people claim to believe in a god, angels, answers to prayer, and divine revelation suggests tbat researcb focusing on tbe attributes of these agents is a meaningful way of understanding religion. And fourth, such research can usefully be guided by probing tbe kinds of mental categories tbat people employ, such as standard distinctions between near and far, smart and dumb, or weak and powerful.

METAPHORS
Research on metaphors is closely related to work on schmas. Whereas studies of schmas emphasize the distinctions among domains, metaphors involve bringing togetber seemingly different cognitive elements, in doing so, metaphors not only compare but also attribute tbe cbaracteristics of one category to the other ("my daughter is an angel"). Metaphors are a familiar feature of religious discourse ("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-

348 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION Stood as ordinary ways of "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (Lakoff and Johnson 1980:5; Glucksberg 2001; Rohrer 2001). Many incorporate words from the physical domain ("I'm feeling doum," "she's an upstanding citizen"), while others mingle ideas from different conceptual domains. War images are common ("he shot down my argument," "evangelicals feel embattled"). Body imagery is also prevalent ("she's thin skinned," "his thoughts are penetrating"), especially in religious discourse ("the church is the body of Christ"), and of course figures importantly in the theoretical writing of Mary Douglas (1966, 1970) and more recently in various empirical studies (Orsi 1985, 2005; Griffith 2004; Klassen 2001). Despite its prominence in religious discourse, metaphor is often overlooked as a topic for scholarly investigation. In the interest of reducing religion to a latent subjective variable, researchers focus on belief in God or frequency of prayer, rather than examining the rich metaphoric language that shapes how people think about God and prayer. Lakoff's (2002) comparison of "strict father" and "nurturant parent" morality illustrates how metaphors shape meaning. Strict fathers are like God, and God is like a strict father. The strict father lovingly disciplines his children to make them strong enough to resist the dangers lurking in the world. Moral strength is like physical strength; it has to be built up through exercise and it keeps one from stumbling and falling. In contrast, the nurturant parent is an empathie figure characterized less by vertical than by horizontal metaphors (such as "walking in one's shoes"). Nurturant parent metaphors are more likely to include female as well as male images ("being fed," "cradled"). God is 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 the cognitive patterning of metaphors demonstrates recurring rules and variations. One is that metaphors do not only reflect cognitive domains, but rather define and reinforce them. Metaphors are essentially symbols of inclusion and exclusion. Spatial metaphors provide the clearest examples; one feels "close" to a friend, 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 that metaphors are grounded in available social experience ("your brain is hardwired") and thus serve valuably in interpreting the connections between meanings and social contexts (Damton 1984 remains a masterful example). Variations emerge from these basic rules of metaphoric construction. The contrasts implied in metaphors are especially interesting. Some emphasize irreconcilable differences between "black" and "white," while others describe "shades of gray," "blurred lines," and "coming together." Variations in the strength of boundaries are also implied by redundancy (repetition of the same metaphor) and coincidence (parallels suggested by different metaphors). Yet another important varia-

COGNITION AND RELIGION 349 tion concerns the concreteness of metaphoric elements. For instance, those drawn 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 nurturant parent metaphors, the former includes more tangible referents than the latter. The fact that metaphors typically imply normative evaluations is especially pertinent to their role in religion. Metaphors signal the moral messages communicated in religious discourse. Moses goes up to receive the Ten Commandments and comes doum to find the Israelites worshipping the golden calf, and people "grow" and "fall away" in their faith. Besides the moral valences associated with such simple contrasts, religious discourse includes interpellations (Althusser 1969, 1972) that produce moral symmetry. When Adam falls from grace, Jesus comes 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 in moral arguments. A loss has to be compensated; if a person (or God) makes a sacrifice, then some effort has to be expended to balance the ledger. The person helped must help someone else; the home of origin an immigrant loses must be made up for by the perception that the new home is a land of opportunity; an unmistakable tragedy means that survivors should look for a blessing (some examples are given in Wuthnow 2006).

NARRATIVES
Narratives are more elaborate than schmas and metaphors. Cognitive research suggests that narratives are not simply the playful obsession of people who like stories; narratives are one of the most important schmas humans use to organize information (Herman 2003). Narratives impose meaning on behavior and experiences by identifying a relevant starting point, describing an interim event, and depicting an end state that differs from the initial state and is in some way explained by what happens in between (Bal 1998; Franzosi 1998). The temporal aspect of narratives is a crucial topic for cognitive inquiry. For instance, Gerulo (1998) shows that the sequencing of elements in narratives about violence 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 typically composed of narratives, and much of the ordinary content of religionssermons, prayers, testimonials, tractsalso takes a narrative form (Stromberg 1993). In addition, researchers themselves frequently elicit narratives, especially through qualitative interviews. Narratives can be analyzed through different lenses and for different purposes. Bearman and Stoval (2004) argue that narratives can be likened to networks.

350 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION with each event being regarded as a node, and the connections among these events described as arcs. Doing this provides a way of graphically mapping the structure of a narrative, showing the temporal sequence of events and their perceived association. Different accounts involving some of the same events can then be compared. For instance. Smith (2005) uses this method to compare the accounts of people in two different ethnic groups about a major historic event in their community. She finds that one group told stories with many connections organized around a few central events, while the other group remembered hardly any of the same events. Thinking of narratives as networks of elements and connections leads to hypotheses about the relative durability of various stories. Culture-producing institutions, such as churches and schools, perpetuate narratives by repeating accounts of particularly central events. In Smith's (2005) study, for instance, respondents in the ethnic group with clearer memories frequently reported accounts that they had learned in school or heard on television. Durability also depends on the density of linkages among elements. It has been argued, for example, that the longevity of the Brothers' Grimm fairy tales lies partly in the fact that the stories contain relatively few central characters or events and can be elaborated in a variety of ways (Grimm and Grimm 2004). As a different example, an application of matrix theory suggests that a loosely coupled system of elements is likely to be more stable than one in which an adjustment to one necessitates adjustments to all the others. Thus, a fundamentalist belief system that emphasizes a few core tenets but denies that any can be logically or rationally related to the others is likely to endure longer than a belief system that insists on all 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 woman joining her husband and then going, going to church and going to pray, praying at church, or something else? In short, mapping procedures need to be theoreti' cally driven and thus careful in determining whether sequences, relations among actors, activities, moods, locations, or other aspects are the most important. In addition, a distinction needs to be made between the Storni (including all elements 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 itself or in related materials about how the story was generated. It is the metanarrative in which the story itself appears. In a qualitative interview, it is the fact that the story is being told to an interviewer and in response to a question. Less obviously, the metanarrative also includes clues about the origins and intent of a story. For instance, Witten's (1995) analysis of Protestant sermons showed numerous examples of clergy including stories about themselves that helped to establish their authority by showing them answering people's questions.

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IDENTITY, PRACTICE, AND EXPERIENCE

Thus far, I have mentioned ways in which cognitive studies of schmas, metaphors, and narratives pertain generally to religion. Many of these examples focus on thought about suprahuman agents. These agents, however, also serve as interaction partners with human persons. How people think about themselves raises important sociological questions about the construction of personal identity. Interest in the religious aspects of identity is evident in studies of conversion, loyalty to religious communities, consequential internalization of religious norms, and spiritual journeys. Questions about identity have become increasingly interesting in light of evidence that people construct or select self-understandings in relation to multiple religious options (Roof 1999; Wuthnow 1998). How people come to have a particular identity is often examined in one of two ways: the rational actor perspective asserts that people make choices to maximize their self interest (Stark and Finke 2000), while the embedded actor perspective argues that these choices are a reflection of the values of those with whom one associates. Both approaches have been criticized on grounds that they leave the individual actor as an unexamined black box. Yet the challenge remains in how to open this box. If narratives and metaphors are the schmas through which actors make sense of their experience, then they provide important information. How they are organized serves as a connection between the individual and the cultural influences shaping interpretations of individual experience. Several kinds of narratives can be distinguished. Accounts tell why and how a person arrived at a particular state of affairs, such as becoming a stock broker or joining a commune (Scott and Lyman 1968; Orbuch 1997). Stories recount a particular episode, like a chance encounter with a friend, and may illustrate an aspect of an account but usually are not in themselves a full account (Genette 1980). Life stories are personal narratives that integrate many different accounts and stories (Linde 1993; McAdams 1993; Smith and Watson 2001). Gore narratives are distillations from life stories that selectively emphasize an important or central thread of experience, such as one's quest for excellence or fear of the future (Wuthnow 1998). Finally, so-called grand or master narratives are scholarly renditions of popular myths that involve the repetitious telling of stories about a social entity; American civil religion and progressive socialism would be examples (Smith 2003). Self narratives relate to and incorporate elements from these grand narratives concerning the society in which one lives. Paying close attention to the wording of personal narratives can provide important clues about cultural understandings of the self, which in turn shape how spirituality is located in relation to the self. Goffman (1959) and more recently Gergen (1991), among others, have argued that the contemporary self is multi-faceted or "multiphrenic," meaning that it permits people to hold seemingly contradictory beliefsabout God, science, self-interest, altruism, and the

352 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION likewith relative ease. Standard research on cognitive schmas has paid little attention 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 permits different parts of the self to reflect on one another, to speak with different voices, 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 in tbis way: "I guess I do believe, although, like my father used to say, 'Maybe God is just in my imagination'but I think that's probably too harsh." The comment registers an internal dialogue and a part of the self that seeks to correct an assertion made by a different part. Tbis is quite different from the respondents in Smith's (2005) study who, having largely been reared under totalitarian rule, reported what they had learned in school or from their parents but never indicated disagreeing witb it. The role of cognition in religious practice is another topic ripe for investigation. The concept of practice has proven increasingly attractive in discussions of religion, as well as in sociology more generally, because it emphasizes the learned and sequential character of action instead of treating acts as discrete elements of behavior (Maclntyre 1984; Stout 1988; Wuthnow 1998; Bourdieu 1977). The difference 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 week or year. If praying is a practice, then it becomes important to know about its history: 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 been answered. Tbe idea of practice is thus a schema that affects how the component acts involved in prayer are organized. Considerations about metaphor provide a reminder that religious practices are often interpretedby tbose who engage in them and by those who study themmetaphorically. For instance, Bourdieu (1984) associates practice with habitus 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, and other games, thus emphasizing competition, skill, and mastery. The previously mentioned concept of expertise domains points to the value of likening religious practice to other skills. Some of these practices are suspected of reinforcing particular cognitive patterns. Meditation and sustained involvement in altruistic bebavior are two examples. The relevance of cognition to studies of religious practice is also evident in questions that have gained prominence in recent years about what exactly makes a practice "religious" (Asad 1993; Tweed 2005). These questions arise especially in studies seeking to learn whether "religion" matters in nonreligious contexts. For instance. Bender (2003) studied ordinary discourse at a soup kitchen to see when and how religious topics (such as God or church going) appeared. Prayer

COGNITION AND RELIGION 353 would be an interesting topic of investigation for similar purposes. The statement, "she is praying," invokes a schema unique even among other statements that 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 response to simplistic arguments about whether conventional religious practices are declining or holding steady, for instance. Berger (1998) has suggested that a qualitative shift in the meaning of spirituality has taken place. But how would one test that assertion? One way would be to examine the metaphors used to describe spirituality in different eras. For example, in my work on spirituality in the United States since the 1950s, I found that earlier metaphors emphasized place, location, dwellings, homes, and families, whereas more recent metaphors emphasized journeys, movement, change, and temporality (Wuthnow 1998). Another aspect of religious practice that is of continuing interest is religion's potential for limiting socially destructive behavior (such as crime or adultery). Standard formulations focus on moral rules in religious texts (such as the Ten Commandments). Emphasis on rules leads to a bias that regards religion primarily as a utilitarian system of rewards and punishments. Sociologically, a more interesting line of inquiry emerges when one asks about the significance of religion's proposition that supernatural agents have unlimited access to one's own and others' thoughts. Following Cooley's (1922) familiar "looking glass" argu' ment, individuals adjust their behavior according to how they believe others perceive them. Yet the fact that one person never knows for sure what another person is thinking raises two problems: being able to act in a way that intentionally deceives someone else, and failing despite good intentions to live up to another person's expectations. Deception and well-intentioned nonconformity open doors for self-interested, asocial, or socially maladaptive behavior and thus pose problems in their own right. In addition, though, intentions themselves matter. The sense of moral order that holds a society together rests not only on good behavior, but also on good intentions (for instance, donating to charity for the "right reasons"). Judgments about intentions permit similar actions to be evaluated differently. They also permit "accidents" to be excused. An omniscient supernatural being with knowledge of intentions thus performs an important social function (Bering and Johnson 2005). A divine rule has power not only because violators might be punished but also because people assume that it is based on perfect knowledge. Individuals monitor their behavior but also the thoughts that might lead them to negative behavior. In addition, individuals assume that others do the same. Yet another implication of what we have considered is that the sharp distinction that is often drawn between practice (behavior) and belief (non-behavior) collapses. The reason is that practice typically involves utterances ("1 pronounce 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 relationships and actions. The religious world is, as Orsi (2005) has argued, populated by gods, saints, heroes, ancestors, and other special beings, and it is a social world in which these beings and ordinary humans enter into relationships with one another. Ironically, then, an interest in cognition as something presumably "in here," leads to a focus on the structures and patterns among the observable emanations of cognition. These structures and patterns are evident in speech and gestures that make up ritual action, in the stories told through these rituals, and in the narratives recorded in sacred texts, personal anecdotes, interviews, and newspaper accounts. It is for this reason that discussions of culture more broadly increasingly focus on discourse. The relevance of cognitive approaches to the study of religious experience can be suggested by briefly mentioning three implications. First, it is probably safe to say that one of the tensions between mainstream studies of religion and cognitive approaches is the fact that religion often involves deep emotion, whereas cognition seems to stack the decks in favor of purely rational or mentalistic perspectives. However, cognitive studies increasingly demonstrate the conditions under which affective regions of the brain dominate rational processing activities. For instance, research on moral reasoning (Moll et al. 2002a, 2002b) shows that difficult moral dilemmas activate parts of the brain that govern emotions more than parts dealing with rational thought. Second, cognitive studies increasingly document the extent to which mental frameworks influence perception. For instance, fMRI research on subjects under hypnosis shows that higher-order processing mechanisms are blocked and thus permit subjects literally to perceive information differently than they ordinarily do (Blakeslee 2005). Yet research also points to the limits of arguments claiming that perception is entirely shaped by larger frameworks. For instance, the famous argument that Brahe and Kepler saw the sun differently because of their different theories of the solar system has been credibly refuted on grounds that the experience of seeing the sun "rise" is rooted in a physical schema that cannot be overridden by theoretical knowledge (Gerhart and Russell 2004). Thus, questions remain about the extent to which experiences of ecstasy or transcendence do or do not depend on interpretive frameworks. And third, deep emotionwhether experienced directly or preserved in texts and other secondary accountsbecomes an important marker in narratives. As Collins (2004) has argued, rituals have special significance in social life because they induce and commemorate times of great individual and collective emotion. Neuroimaging studies suggest that memories of emotionladen experiences (such as religious or sexual experiences) generate brain patterns remarkably similar to those evident when events are experienced for the first time (Keltner and Haidt 2003). Religious rituals and texts that remind people of a time of grief, redemption, or special joy may, therefore, be even more powerful than sometimes assumed.

COGNITION AND RELIGION 355

CONCLUSIONS
For sociology of religion, recent developments in cognitive studies underscore the importance of studying religion as cultural practice and point toward a new way of thinking about culture. Schemas, metaphors, narratives, identities, practices, and experiences become culture the moment they are observed by someone else. At that moment, they are no longer private ruminations or mental images but public. They reflect cognitive processes. Yet they do not require sociology to become psychology any more than the physical properties of DNA require neuroscientists to become physicists. As greater knowledge of cognition is gained, the manner in which culture is investigated nevertheless changes. The current shift might be likened to the transformation in language studies from philology to generative grammar. This transition entailed focusing less on the substantive content of language and more on the rules by which language was constructed. Studies of culture are now shifting in the same way. Increasing attention is being paid to the rules through which culture is constructed. That culture is constructed is no longer the issue. How it is constructed has become the important question. Moreover, the idea of rules also changes. Cognitive studies show that children do not learn to use language appropriately by literally learning and then deploying hundreds of grammatical rules. Instead, complex schmas provide instantaneous cues about what to say. The application to studies of religion lies in the fact that religious beliefs and practices are enormously complex and variableso much so that purely descriptive studies produce information that rapidly becomes too vast to assimilate. Looking at the processes that underlie this complexity is the essential next step for heuristic reasons alone. In this transition, the standard tools of investigation are not fundamentally changed. As suggested in my earlier example, surveys remain useful as sources of information about general tendencies and variations within populations. Controlled experiments may again find greater use in sociology, especially as surveys become increasingly expensive and subject to intractable sampling and response biases. With digitization, textual analysis becomes especially attractive. Interview transcripts, newspaper articles, blogs, sermons, and even historical manuscripts all become valuable sources of information. These are the materials people generate when they think. In concluding, it is important to remember that the best work in sociology has always paid attention to questions about cognition. One has only to recall Mead's (1932) writing about the mind, Schutz's (1970) important but often neglected essays on the cognitive setting of the life-world. Parsons' (1951) fascination 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 work on cognitive development to see the connections. What I have tried to describe here are a few of the ways in which the connections with cognitive science may again be opening new lines of inquiry.

3 5 6 SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

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