More than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion

In the last two decades, a growing number of religious studies scholars have broadened their interpretive gaze beyond the study of sacred texts to include the study of lived religion or everyday religious practice. While that ethnographic turn has been widely celebrated within the discipline, particularly among those in the subfields of religion in the Americas, religion and transnational migration, and diaspora studies, few scholars have provided a sustained theoretical justification for its methodological exercise. In More than Belief, Vasquez does just that. He offers a nonreductive materialist framework for the study of religion, reconsidering the epistemological assumptions of religious studies and retooling its disciplinary methodologies to better study the “everyday activities of situated actors who have come to identify what they do as religious” (9). The theorizing presented in the book developed out of a practical pedagogical need. Teaching graduate seminars in method and theory in the study of religion at the University of Florida, Vasquez grew frustrated by the epistemological disconnect between the dominant disciplinary canon and his and his students' lived research experiences with transnational migrants. He argues that the dominant canon, built on the “Niebuhrs, Barths, and Tillichs of the world,” is hindered by an enduring theological concern for spiritual transcendence, private religion, and textual revelation (1). Those particularly Protestant ways of knowing about religious experience prove ill suited for studying fluid, hybrid, boundary-crossing material religious identities, practices, and spaces.