2 of 3

Smith: A full understanding of human life has to account both for social structural forces at work, as well as personal experience and action. Structural and institutional analyses are good and important, but to understand the fullness of how and why life works the way it does, I believe we also need an account of human actors who engage the world with particular kinds of personal capacities, needs, and interests and who perceive, evaluate, make choices, and live in relationships for reasons that are meaningful to them. People are not mere pawns shoved around by "social forces." They are participants in the making of their own lives, even though they do not have absolute control over or perspective on that. So if we want to understand religion, we have to work to see how it is experienced by the people actually involved in it; otherwise we miss a crucial dimension. Of course, this is not only true of religion but of any human social reality.

CT: In explaining how Christianity works for and in the lives of believers, you mention the apparently failed prophecies of the church's demise by Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. You say flatly that Christianity is not likely to die anytime soon. Is this a message the scholarly community needs to hear? If so, why?

Smith: This is a message worth continuing to say. It is becoming more commonly accepted in the academy that religion is not going away anytime soon, although more than a few, I think, still view religion as irrational and destined to be displaced by science, reason, etc. In the sociology of religion as a field, secularization theory is far from dead, it is still a live debate. My piece is an attempt to contribute to the debate from a different-than-usual angle.

CT: There's one thing I can't leave behind after our interview and reading the article. You explain why Christianity works, but I keep thinking the explanation would simply satisfy the person who says, "See, religion is a mental crutch!" I want to respond that I'm not a Christian because it accomplishes x, y, and z in my life. I'm a Christian because I believe Christ really did rise from the dead. You leave that point unaddressed. Isn't it the case that many Christians embrace the faith, not for its effects but for what they believe is its truthfulness?

Smith: Sure. But those are not mutually exclusive things. Both can be true. In most cases people really do believe it. But believing it may also have certain often-positive effects for people emotionally. Why can't it be both? To call religion a "crutch" is a negative way of saying people rely on it. But people do rely on it. So what? That's fine. Everyone relies on lots of things. This can be interpreted from a believing perspective or a non-believing perspective, as I say in the article. But nothing in the article per se needs to undermine faith.

Baylor takes down faculty member's Intelligent Design webpage
William Dembski's Polanyi Center, which was to pursue Intelligent Design research at Baylor University, is a distant memory but the controversy continues. Baylor engineering professor Robert Marks has been using his faculty website to publish research in "evolutionary informatics." The university shut down his website, claiming Marks failed to get prior approval. Marks says the university doesn't exercise similar control over other faculty webpages.

next page... |  2 of 3

share this page

September (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51