Notes on William James, Geertz, Bellah, and Wittgenstein: Definitions and Theories in Religion

William James: pragmatism, religion, and the personal- vs. institutional distinction

• Context: Course unit on religion; focus on the personal religious experience as foundational rather than solely institutional structures.
• William James: American philosopher in the school of pragmatism; major works include:
  • The will to believe (speech on proofs for the existence of God; relevance for our thinking about belief and justification)
  • The varieties of religious experience (central to today’s discussion; chapters 1 and the final chapter define religion and religious experience for the purposes of the course)
• James’s key distinction: personal religion vs. institutional religion
  • Institutional religion concerns the dynamics of religious groups, doctrines, organizational structures; not his primary interest
  • Personal religion comes first; it gives rise to institutional expressions
• Foundational claim: all religions begin with the founder’s lived spiritual experiences, which are central to personal religion
  • Examples invoked: Islam — Muhammad’s revelations; Buddhism — the Buddha’s enlightenment, the prescription he provides to attain and pursue that experience
• Core definition (in James’s framework): religion is belief in an unseen order and our adjustments to it
  • Seen and unseen: people perceive an order beyond the visible world; this unseen cosmos governs existence
  • The order is experienced as a pattern that reorganizes how people see themselves, others, and their relation to the world
  • The supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting oneself to this unseen order through inner alignment
  • Music metaphor: the “harmony of the spheres” represents the unseen order; individuals tune their lives to align with that order
• The religious attitude (James’s central concept)
  • The attitude consists of: a belief in a reality (the unseen order) and an adjustment of life to that belief
  • This attitude can be illustrated through the musician’s process of tuning to a heavenly choir; the extent of adjustment can be large or small
• James on religious realism vs. nonrealism
  • He sits on the knife-edge between religious realism and nonrealism
  • He argues that religious objects exist within the consciousness of the religious subject regardless of physical reality
  • Personal belief can be more real to the believer than the external or “external” manifestations of the religious reality
• Skepticism and humility about ultimate realities
  • The reality of God or the ultimate divine reality may be beyond full human grasp; perhaps human conceptions are incomplete
  • Religion remains real to the believer even if one suspects the full ultimate reality has not yet been conceived or grasped fully
• The role of subjective experience in religion
  • James prescribes that religious impact hinges on the subjective religious experience, not solely on external or institutional manifestations
  • The believer’s conceptualization of Jesus, God, or divine reality can be more real in its effect than any external proof or physical presence; yet, believers still strive to conform ideas to scriptural or theological norms
• Personal example and reflection (speaker’s notes, not itself canonical theology)
  • The speaker reflects on Jesus as a personal concept developed through life, which may or may not perfectly match the biblical portrait
  • Emphasis on hope and faith: one can believe in an ultimate reality while acknowledging imperfect knowledge about the actual person or nature of Jesus
• James’s stance on religious reality
  • All religious objects exist within consciousness; their reality is not simply reducible to empirical verification
  • The religious relation involves hope, faith, and an ongoing process of interpretation and adjustment
• Summary takeaway from James
  • Personal religious experience is foundational and primary; institutional religion grows out of and aims to organize these experiences
  • Religion involves belief in an unseen order and a disciplined, harmonious adjustment to that order

Clifford Geertz: culture, meaning, and religion as a system of symbols

• Geertz: American cultural anthropologist; fieldwork in Bali, Indonesia (Hindu majority on a Muslim majority island)
• Core claim: human beings are meaning-makers; they create webs of meaning and then live in those webs
  • Analogy: spiders weave webs and then live in them; humans make meaning and then inhabit the meaning they make
• Religion as a symbolic system
  • Religions use symbols to represent complex, deeper meanings that shape understanding of the world
  • Language, imagery, actions, dress, architecture, cuisine, art—all are symbolic expressions of religious meaning
• Religion’s power: emotions, motivations, and actions
  • Religion powerfully motivates feelings (e.g., shame, guilt, elation) and behaviors; this is a modern articulation of Durkheim’s idea of religion shaping social life
• Religion as a formulation of life’s order
  • Religion provides a conception of how life’s order is structured; this order is given a “fact-like” aura and treated as real within the culture
• The realism/nonrealism tension in Geertz’s view
  • Geertz, like James, teeters between realism and nonrealism: religious symbols may be real to people even if the underlying referent is not empirically verifiable
  • A scientist-ethnographer’s stance requires not to dismiss other cultures as merely primitive or false; instead, to understand how their beliefs work within their own social world
• Inhabiting religion vs. denouncing it
  • To study religion is not to judge it as false but to understand how it makes sense to adherents and why it works in their lives
• Practical anthropological stance
  • Start with the premise that the culture knows what it is doing; understand why the symbolic system works for them and what needs it satisfies
• Distinction and shared themes with James
  • The idea that religions shape perception and social life through symbols resonates with James’s emphasis on the unseen order and personal adjustment; Geertz operationalizes how symbols organize lived experience
• Example of “making beliefs seem uniquely realistic”
  • Religious beliefs appear particularly credible within the symbol system of a culture even when external verification is limited or contested

Robert Bellah: nonordinary reality, evolution, and the human capacity for religion

• Robert Bellah (Berkeley sociologist) and his lineage to Durkheim and Geertz
• Bellah’s central concept: religion creates a nonordinary reality and then symbolizes it for people; humans inhabit that symbolic world
  • The aim: describe how humans evolved with the symbolic and religious capacity; what makes religion possible in humans
• Nonordinary reality defined
  • Spiritual or mystical experiences beyond everyday perception; experiences that connect followers to transcendent or sacred dimensions
• The heuristic of nonordinary reality across contexts
  • Nonordinary reality emerges in many contexts: ritual, meditation, community worship, buildings and shrines, clothing, behaviors, group activities
  • It can be instantiated in both collective settings (monasteries, churches, temples, Sabbath) and individual practices
• The biopsychology of religious capacity
  • Bellah emphasizes humanity’s capacity to conceive, symbolize, and animate alternate realities
  • This capacity requires language, symbol-making, and the ability to imagine realities that may be unseen yet compelling
• Nonordinary reality and time/space examples (to illustrate the concept)
  • Time as nonordinary: a football game is 60 minutes of play, but TV time and halftime extend this to about 3.5 hours in the Super Bowl; rules of time controlled by referees and TV producers; time becomes a socially constructed reality
  • Space as nonordinary: a football field is a constructed space with defined yard lines; pickup games in unstructured spaces still evoke a sense of order and rules
  • Other nonordinary spaces: courtrooms, the Senate, dress codes, and other formal institutions where rules and procedures constrain behavior
• Everyday life vs nonordinary life in secular domains
  • The point is to show that nonordinary realities are not exclusive to religion; similar dynamics occur in sports, law, politics, etc., and thus religion is one expression of a universal human tendency to create and inhabit alternative realities
• Oceanic or “infinite and boundless whole” experience
  • Religious knowing evokes a sense of being part of a larger whole; this experience can be deeply personal and transformative
  • Freud’s oceanic feel is invoked to illustrate a primal religious experience that can give rise to belief in the sacred
• Symbolic articulation and memory
  • Symbols are verbal and nonverbal; they connect individuals to spiritual realities and religious meanings; they can function as bridges to evoke or reinvoke religious experiences (e.g., Mary, Guadalupe imagery, liturgical objects)
• Practical implications of the Bellah-Geertz-Braided approach
  • Understanding how religion works in real cultures requires attending to nonordinary realities and the symbolic capacities that create and sustain religious worlds
  • This approach helps explain why religions can be deeply meaningful and emotionally potent even when their empirical claims cannot be verified

Verbal and nonverbal symbols in religion

• Symbols operate on multiple levels to evoke deeper meanings beyond their surface appearance
  • Examples include flags (evoking patriotism), Mary/Guadalupe imagery (evoking devotion and historical meaning)
• Religious experiences often initiate or intensify symbol use
  • A personal religious experience may lead to the creation or adoption of a symbol to repeat, reinvoke, or reevoke the experience
• Symbols function as bridges between individuals and sacred realities
  • They help connect everyday life to religious meanings and can be reinterpreted by different people in different times
• Variability of symbol meaning across individuals and contexts
  • The same symbol can evoke different ideas and emotions in different people or in the same person at different times
• Practical note in teaching terms
  • The teacher uses symbols (e.g., a Guadalupe image) to illustrate how symbols function in religious life; students should reflect on their own symbols and experiences to understand how religion works in their lives

Ludwig Wittgenstein: religion as a language game and its family resemblance

• Wittgenstein’s central claim: philosophy is a language game; religion can be seen as a language game too
• Religion as a cluster of overlapping features rather than a single essence
  • There is no single defining essence of religion; instead, religions share a family resemblance across overlapping features
  • Core traits that often appear across many religions include belief in superhuman or transcendental realities, rituals, moral codes, and sacred texts; however, not all religions have all these features
• The idea of family resemblance used to account for diversity
  • Different religions overlap in different ways; there is no single essential set of properties all religions share
• Implication for understanding religious truth claims
  • Because there is no single essence, one must evaluate religious truth across multiple dimensions and contexts rather than seeking a universal, one-size-fits-all definition

Substantive vs. functional definitions of religion; how definitions shape study

• Substantive definitions
  • Focus on the content of religious belief: belief in gods or miracles, life after death, sacred objects, etc.
  • View religion primarily as belief-centered and theological/doctrinal in orientation
• Functional definitions
  • Focus on what religion does for people and communities: emotional support, social cohesion, moral guidance, meaning-making, etc.
  • Broader definitions that allow for belief systems that may not center on gods (e.g., ethical systems, rituals, and communal practices that create a sense of sacred)
• The course’s stance on breadth vs. depth
  • Functional and broader definitions help account for diverse religious phenomena beyond belief in deities
  • Substantive definitions can miss important social, psychological, and cultural dimensions of religion
• The two-dimensional chart (conceptual map)
  • One axis: substantive vs functional; the other axis: personal religion vs institutional religion
  • This helps scholars explore how religions operate psychologically for individuals and sociologically for groups, beyond merely what they profess to believe
• Practical implications for study and critique
  • Encourages evaluating rituals, community life, and symbolic systems as well as doctrinal content
  • Opens space to consider religions without gods and to assess how ritual solidifies belief and identity
• The eight definitions handout (course material)
  • The instructor encourages selecting and defending an operating definition that resonates with the student’s own philosophical stance
  • The aim is to critique and adapt definitions to fit one’s understanding; “you’re the philosopher in the room”

Preferred definitions and scholarly preferences (course reflections)

• Bellah’s definition (nonordinary reality; symbolism; inhabiting the symbolic world)
• Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern (religion as ultimate concern) and the broad move away from a narrow god-centered definition
• The instructor’s favorites and why they matter for understanding religion as a lived human phenomenon
  • Bellah: religion as world-creating and world-inhabiting through symbolic life
  • Tillich: ultimate concerns that organize meaning and lend structure to life
• Emphasis on practical implications
  • How ritual, symbols, and experiences fix belief or reframe life in terms of a sacred order
• The instructor’s closing reflections
  • Recognize that definitions shift with culture and philosophy; religious truth claims are evaluated differently across contexts; Nazism as a debated example of whether it constitutes religion or a distortion/parody of religion

Connections, implications, and real-world relevance

• How definitions shape interpretation of religious phenomena
  • Substantive vs functional: influences whether we ask about belief in God or about rituals and communities that provide meaning and social order
• Role of ritual in solidifying belief
  • Rituals act to reinforce social and personal commitments, linking practice with belief
• Ethics, culture, and social dimensions
  • Religion cannot be reduced to belief alone; it has ethical, cultural, and social dimensions that matter for understanding how people live and interact
• How diverse religious truths are approached in philosophical inquiry
  • Different scholars offer complementary lenses (James: inner experience and adjustment; Geertz: symbols and social meaning; Bellah: nonordinary reality; Wittgenstein: language-game and family resemblance)
• Open questions for further study
  • How does ritual function to sustain belief? Can religions exist without gods? How do different cultures justify truth claims across religions? What makes one religious system more rational or compelling than another?

Nazism as a religious question: boundaries and definitions

• The instructor raises a provocative question: is Nazism a religion?
  • A provocative test case for how we define religion and where we draw the line between religion and ideology or parody
• The point: shifting cultural, philosophical, and societal views shape what counts as religion
• This serves as a reminder to evaluate definitions critically and to consider multiple dimensions (belief, practices, symbols, community effects, and existential concerns)

Summary takeaways and reflections

• Definitions of religion matter because they shape what we study, how we interpret beliefs, rituals, and social practices, and how we assess truth claims
• Major lines of thought covered:
  • William James: religion as belief in an unseen order and harmonious adjustment; personal religion comes first; subjective experience is central; realism vs. nonrealism is a spectrum
  • Clifford Geertz: religion as a symbolic system; meaning-making; “web of meaning”; symbols shape behavior and emotions; anthropological stance emphasizes cultural understanding over judgment
  • Robert Bellah: nonordinary reality; religion creates and inhabits symbolic realities; religion’s capacity to evoke oceanic experiences; nonreligious analogues of nonordinary realities in secular life
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein: philosophy as language game; religion as a cluster of overlapping features; family resemblance rather than a single essence
  • Substantive vs. functional definitions: broadening or narrowing focus on belief in gods, miracles, vs. rituals, communities, and social functions
• Final guidance for students
  • Engage with definitions actively: pick an operating definition that resonates for you, critique it, and be ready to justify it
  • Consider both personal belief and institutional expressions when analyzing religion
  • Be prepared to discuss how ritual, symbols, and experiences contribute to religious life and to the understanding of truth claims
• Practical assignment note
  • Read chapter 9 and provide thoughtful evidence for engagement with the material; come with questions and reflections at the next class

Appendix: key terms and concepts to remember

• Unseen order: a reality beyond the visible world that people believe governs existence; basis for religious adjustment
• Harmonious adjustment: aligning one’s life with the unseen order for a sense of moral and existential order
• Religious attitude: combination of belief in a reality and life adjustments to it
• Personal religion vs. institutional religion: personal, experiential faith versus organizational, doctrinal expression
• Web of meaning: Geertz’s metaphor for how cultures construct and inhabit a symbolic system
• Nonordinary reality: experiences or spaces that transcend everyday perception and shape religious belief
• Oceanic experience: a primal sense of being part of an infinite, boundless whole
• Symbol: verbal/nonverbal signs that convey religious meaning and enable invocation of religious experiences
• Language game: Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy (and religion, in some sense) is a way of using language within specific practices
• Family resemblance: Wittgenstein’s idea that concepts (like religion) share overlapping features rather than a single essence
• Substantive definition: religion defined by content (beliefs, gods, miracles, afterlife)
• Functional definition: religion defined by what it does (meaning, support, social cohesion), possibly without gods
• Ultimate concern (Tillich): religion as what gives life ultimate significance and direction

Homework reminders

• Revisit the chapter on religious experience (next week’s focus)
• Reflect on how your own operating definition of religion would classify various beliefs, practices, and communities you know
• Be prepared to discuss how ritual and symbol reinforce religious experience in your own context