SYMBOLS, STORIES, AND PRACTICES: New Empirical Directions in the Study of Religious Meaning

Over the past three decades, there has been a growing interest in religion's special meaning-making function. At the same time, scholars have become increasingly sensitive to the fact that the meanings evoked by religious symbols, stories, and practices are not universally shared and that they vary by social context. To date, sociologists of religion interested in the problem of shared meaning have not employed methods that can bring together diverse religious meanings and social settings in the same research design. As a result, their work has produced few empirical generalizations upon which a long-term research agenda might be built. In other subdisciplines, such as cultural sociology, researchers have employed new quantitative methods that can empirically connect variations in cultural meanings to variations in social context. This article calls for importing these methodological advances into the sociological study of religious meaning.
There is an enormous irony in the fact that God is in his heaven in the social sciences—or at least a very important section of the social sciences sociology]—even as he seems to be vanishing from the altars. Michael Harrington, The Politics at God's Funeral