This volume represents the culmination of a prolific career of scholarship and teaching spanning more than four decades. For those who have appreciated Stanley Stowers’ penetrating scholarly insights into ancient religion that critically challenge received assumptions and traditional categories, there will be many things here to appreciate.
History and the Study of Religion is decidedly theoretical in its orientation, with two of its three parts concerned with “Religion as a Social Kind” and “Religion and Social Theory,” respectively. Subsequently, Part 3—“Christian Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean as a Test Case”—is dedicated to historical analysis of Christian origins. A central aim throughout Stowers’ theoretical discussions is to counter anti-realism in religious studies, that is, that “religion is only an arbitrary social construction of the modern West” (p. 3). Over against this, he endeavors “to show why and how religion ought to be understood realistically as a social kind by those who study it” and to apply “the approach to the study of ancient Mediterranean religion and especially early Christianity” (p. 4). In keeping with his work elsewhere, in the introductory chapter, Stowers set out an ambitious agenda, among other things to remove several obstructive concepts, such as “monotheism, worship, community, paganism, the big bang theory of Christian origins, the age of martyrdom, and the triumph of morally superior religion and society” (p. 4). In addition, he spells out some of his methodologies, such as a preference for “lived religion” rather than “history from above” (pp. 4–5), and cross-disciplinarity that, among other things, breaks down divisions between classical and biblical studies (pp. 18–19). As illustrative, the opening chapter closes with a case study of the Roman Lares (pp. 6–14). These household deities were widely attested throughout private homes and yet “did not have myth or theology or laws” (p. 11), thus exemplifying how localized street-level religion could flourish even without systematic articulation.
The core of Stowers’ theory of ancient Mediterranean religion running through every chapter of History and the Study of Religion is that it is a kind characterized by four subkinds: first, “religion of everyday social exchange,” the most basic, which supports the other kinds, “organizes itself around imagined exchange and reciprocity with environmentally relevant gods and similar non-evident beings”; second, civic religion, functioning politically in cities or across empires and controlled by aristocrats; third, religion of literate experts, with a variety of possible relationships to subkinds one and two; fourth, religion of literate experts with political or institutional power, sometimes in collaboration with civic religion (p. 88 and passim).
Opening Part 1, Chapter 2 (“Realism and Antirealism about Religion”) starts with the question of what religion is, if anything at all, and leads Stowers through a wide-ranging discussion of philosophers from Kant to Foucault. His critique is aimed at popular academic claims that religion is merely a modern concept and not something that “exists out there.” This analysis is extended in chapter 3, “Theorizing Social Kinds,” with a distinction between “idealist romantic social constructionism” and “realist social constructivism” (at pp. 70–71). Here he offers the concept of species in biological sciences as a useful paradigm for the study of religion (pp. 71–72). Species are not a priori abstractions, and yet they are treated with realist criteria even if they can in some cases be constructed through selective breeding. Analogously, “religion” may have “both causal and conventional elements that allow for relative stability and replication,” and accordingly research should entail “inquiry about the histories of social kinds and the variation within and across kinds” (pp. 76–77).
In chapter 4, “Toward Theorizing Religion as a Social Kind,” Stowers opens the possibility for analysis that does not depend on religion as an “essence.” Religion is neither merely an “epiphenomenon of the economy” nor is it autonomous as an “innate or human universal” (p. 90). Navigating between these, he advances his proposed theorization of religion as a “causal epistemic kind” with “subkinds” as a productive way forward. Its academic study must cross disciplines, drawing evidence from historical, ethnographical, cognitive and psychological fields. Accordingly, he proceeds with an extensive discussion of two leading theories of mind in cognitive psychology as they are relevant to the formation of religious ideas (pp. 95–105).
Opening Part 2, Chapter 5, “Cognitive Science of Religion,” carries on his criticism of those who would do away with the category “religion.” Anthropologists, for instance, argue based upon field work in smaller scale societies that religion does not exist independently from other domains, but only began to emerge with the organization of priesthoods and divisions of labor. One consequence of such an approach, Stowers counters, is inadvertently to reinforce notions of western uniqueness, as though Abrahamic religions entail a distinction between sacred and secular, which is then in turn inherent in the definition of religion. Against this, Stowers maintains that the distinctive organization in the modern west with “semi-autonomous areas of social activity in contrast to most of the world’s greater integration, gives us no reason to deny that religion has an indispensable epistemic role as a social kind across history and cultures” (p. 166).
In chapter 6, “Thinking the Ontology of Religion,” Stowers continues to explore how philosophy shapes social theory, particularly in the ways we conceptualize the nature of entities that make up the social world. Can they be reduced to actions and interactions between individuals, or are institutions and structures themselves non-reducible? This chapter concludes the theoretical parts of the book by sketching how different societies correlate to cognitive patterns within each of the four subkinds. In agricultural societies, for instance, by contrast to foraging societies, where there is land ownership and surplus production, there tend to be gods/non-evident beings. Civic religion is also based ontologically on the agricultural environment, whereas literate experts may be semiautonomous, dependent on the technologies of writing and literacy.
In the remaining four chapters making up Part 3, first, chapter 7 is devoted to a critique of Rodney’s Stark’s sociological approach to the rise of Christianity, the so-called “big bang theory of Christian origins.” Stark treats competing religions in the Roman Empire—pagan, Jewish, Christian—on a model of supply-side economics: the success of a cult or sect depended in large part on the perceived value of the goods on offer (e.g., eternal rewards in the afterlife), with the stricter tending be more successful. Stowers identifies several oversimplifications (e.g., distinctions between exclusive and non-exclusive religions, or permissive and strict), and posits that a better model comes from “the organization of the field of intellectualist competition that characterized the early Roman Empire” (p. 226). This is in turn the subject of chapter 8, where he argues that Christianity arose from struggles between freelance experts (e.g., Paul, Apollos, Marcian, Valentinus, Justin, etc.) who each advanced competing and contested truth claims, staking out their own places vis-à-vis popular philosophical schools and rival Christian teachers. Contrary to those who imagine a moment of original purity, the Christ movement from the Apostle Paul onward was constructed and existed alongside and in competition to popular sophists and philosophers.
The ninth chapter delves further into historical evidence across four significant areas. First, Stowers demonstrates that many localized and private practices associated with religions of everyday exchange persisted in Christian communities (e.g., burial, amulets, lamp-lighting, etc.), continuing alongside what came to be regarded as theologically orthodox practices. Second, he takes on presumptions about monotheism: contrary to widespread views both within and outside the academy, “the ancient Judean and Christian cultures were never monotheistic in any reasonable sense of the word, not even close to monotheistic. And to construe them as such foists a damaging and unjustifiable falsehood onto their histories” (p. 299). Here Stowers is at his most polemical, observing of those who deploy oxymorons such as “binitarian monotheism,” “ignoring mounds of evidence, they will tell you with a straight face that early Christians did not believe Jesus to be a god distinct from the Judean and Christian God” (pp. 300–1). Third, he challenges the uncritical acceptance of Christianity’s explosive growth, especially among historians who have all-too-often adopted as factual the claims made by Christan writers, from Acts to Eusebius, about its miraculous expansion. Fourth, he takes Christian charity as a testcase, offering a corrective to those who view “unrestricted altruism” as a unique characteristic of Christianity. In fact, other groups in antiquity also, such as the Stoics, valued philanthropia as a virtue concerned with generosity to the needy.
Finally, Chapter 10 (“Concluding Arguments”) is not a conclusion at all with expected summary and synthesis but introduces the new and substantial topic of Pauline ecclesiology. It expands the discussion by exploring ways in which Christian freelance experts, like their popular philosophical counterparts, rejected “mundane reciprocity” with gods/non-evident beings. Now, however, bishops had the additional responsibility of enforcing “the truth” in their communities. Thus, Stowers closes with an application of the social theories developed throughout the course of the book to the category of “the church” from its Pauline formulations through the third century.
History and the Study of Religion offers a valuable and far-reaching analysis of theory and religious history. Among its greatest strengths is its orientation of religious studies firmly within the realm of the humanities and social sciences and as a decidedly cross-disciplinary endeavor. Readers should be warned: if they come to the volume expecting historical-critical analysis of early Christianity within its social context, they may find a lot more theory and history of philosophy than expected. Even so, for those who persist, the effort will be amply repaid. The book is well produced, although a cumulative bibliography would have been valuable. In short, History and the Study of Religion solidifies Stowers’ legacy as a generational leader in the field.