Based on a video lecture.
Video lecture: YouTube
On this channel we often dive into specific topics: religion, atheism, contemporary science, how people in different parts of the world relate to various things. But we frequently overlook a more fundamental question: from what standpoint are we actually talking about religion in the first place? From what framework? The question seems abstract and philosophical, and for a long time I treated philosophy roughly the way Alexander Panchin does — as something fairly vague and disconnected from real research. But I have rethought that position lately.
This video was prompted by a lecture by Vladislav Razdyakonov — professor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, religious studies scholar and doctor of philosophy, who works on esotericism and spiritualism. He spent the bulk of a lecture on the fundamentals of studying esotericism on precisely this, and everything fell into place so clearly that I could not help sharing it.
Three approaches, then. Three frameworks through which scholars approach the phenomenon of religion and try to make sense of it.
First Approach: Realism
The realist approach rests on two claims. First: the phenomenon exists objectively, in the real world. Second: it can be studied objectively, through facts and theories. That is, religion genuinely exists, it can be grasped through empirical investigation, it is a fact of reality that can be explained through other facts arranged into a complex theory.
This worldview is called scientific essentialism, naturalism, or reductionism. The word “reductionism” is key: critics argue that followers of this approach try to collapse all the complexity of reality, all the complexity of the phenomenon, into a single simple construction.
The classic example is Pascal Boyer’s cognitive science of religion. For Boyer, religion is an objectively existing thing that can be measured and examined — a fact of reality. This fact is explained through other facts: Boyer proposes starting from brain functions and the adaptive capacities of the organism. His book is titled accordingly: Religion Explained. It reads almost like a manifesto.
Realism draws two main lines of criticism. First, reductionism: it seems to reduce the whole complexity of religious experience to a single mechanism. Second, universalism: if you want to be a real scholar, you must do it this way and no other. This feels a little like intellectual Bolshevism — everyone marching in formation. The criticism is partly fair, but it does not really undermine the approach itself. I personally tend to think of realism as the working foundation for most serious research.
Second Approach: Phenomenology
The phenomenological approach may surprise you, because it starts not from objective reality but from the experiences and sensations of the individual believer.
Proponents of this approach hold that our knowledge is effectively limited to the presence of a phenomenon in our consciousness. We cannot study religion as an objectively existing object. We must study it as a phenomenon of individual consciousness. This means studying Christianity not from the standpoint of what people believe, when they go to church, what rituals they perform. No. We must interpret religion from the standpoint of the personal experience of the believer, from the standpoint of the category of the sacred introduced by the religious scholar and theologian Rudolf Otto.
The crucial difference from realism is this: phenomenology is a descriptive discipline. It aims to describe experience as fully and precisely as possible. Not to explain — to describe. This is why the very title of Boyer’s book, Religion Explained, sounds to a phenomenologist like an absurdity: how can religion be explained? Religion is not a table. It is something that exists in human consciousness, and that is precisely what phenomenologists are interested in.
A good illustration of the phenomenological spirit in anthropology is Clifford Geertz’s famous essay “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Geertz does not reduce cockfighting to a single explanation — he does not say, as a Durkheimian would, that cockfights reinforce social solidarity, and leave it at that. He maps the complex web of connections around the cockfight and then interprets them from the standpoint of how the people themselves experience what is happening. His approach is called interpretive for precisely this reason. That is what interests Geertz, and that is what he takes to be proper scholarship.
Another important feature of phenomenology: the subject and object of study tend to merge. If a scholar genuinely wants to understand the experience of a Christian, they practically need to participate in the same sacraments and share the same sacred objects. This is why, listening to Professor Zubov’s lectures on various religions, I consistently feel I am listening to a theologian — someone who sincerely believes. His lectures on Islam are so deeply immersed in the tradition that he becomes at points indistinguishable from a Muslim, even though he is himself an observant Orthodox Christian.
Phenomenology faces several lines of criticism. First, it does not ask about the nature of the experience: you describe it, but you do not even try to say what it is or what it means. Second, subjectivism: if you are talking about the personal experience of each individual, can this really be called science? Third, phenomenology comes uncomfortably close to the theological approach, since in theology too the personal experience of faith counts as a meaningful argument. The difference is real: phenomenologists do not argue for the existence of God, they study how the experience of the sacred occurs. But the boundary remains unstable.
I have referred to the phenomenological approach many times on this channel, and I think it is a very important complement to realism. Phenomenology allows us to grasp what no neuroscientific data will ever capture: the dimension of religious experience that exists exclusively inside a person.
Third Approach: Constructivism
The central claim of constructivism is this: humans have no direct access to reality. The barrier between them and reality is language. When you use certain categories, you are in effect creating a separate reality — the reality of language, the reality of terms. When you say “this is religion,” you are not describing religion as such; you are constructing the term “religion.” And it is precisely this term, rather than the phenomenon itself, that becomes the object of study.
Dmitry Uzlaner — probably the best-known representative of this approach in Russia, at least to me — wrote about exactly this. He argued that the word “religion” was constructed by European thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and then became widely used in Western scholarship. This is why the term translates poorly to Japan, China, Korea, or Mesoamerica. We have no direct access to religion as such, which means we must study the category itself: how it has been transformed, how it has been understood across different cultures, and what it covers in various contexts.
The constructivist approach is very popular in contemporary Western academia, including among those working on the decolonisation of conceptual frameworks. The argument goes: “religion” is not a neutral description of reality, it is a categorisation that emerged in a specific European context. Exporting it onto other cultures is a form of intellectual colonialism.
There is genuine substance to this. Constructivism helps dismantle myths and forces us to think about the terms we operate with. But when taken to extremes, it substitutes the study of opinions about an object for the study of the object itself. And here, from my perspective, a real problem arises: we risk losing the thing itself.
Three Approaches, Three Legitimate Perspectives
All three approaches are legitimate and have a right to exist. As Razdyakonov rightly observed, working researchers often do not even ask themselves which of these three approaches they are using. They study, say, the tsarebozhniki movement — and they simply study it. But one of the three approaches will inevitably be present, because scholarship has not yet invented a fourth.
My own view is that the best work in religious studies combines all three in some proportion. Realism provides methodological rigour and explanatory power. Phenomenology gives access to the inner dimension of experience that cannot be reduced to neurons. Constructivism reminds us that our categories are tools for describing reality, not reality itself.
Think about it: when you reason about religion, which of these three camps do you instinctively inhabit?