More Than Knowledge

This response by Calvin College's James Smith to a recent Pew Study on American religious illiteracy resonates with my own experience as a pastor:

I had two initial reactions to reports about this survey. The first was cynical: the inability of Americans to articulate the particularities of even their own religious faith sort of confirms the isomorphism of American religion—that the “religion” of this “deeply religious” country is, at the end of the day, just a functional deism necessary to sustain American civil religion.

My second reaction was more critical, and perhaps more charitable: I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” … But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

In this vein, I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.

The difference would be between an active church goer who, though he doesn't know much about the details of the New Testament, actually tries to humbly imitate in his life what he does know of Jesus, and the knowledgeable cynic of Christianity who is selfish and arrogant in his daily living.