In the early twenty-first century, much religion is emotional. We know about the scripture-fueled hatred and anger of religious extremists, the joy of the bornagain, religious promotions of hope and compassion, theological conceptualizations of care, the feelings of assurance, and also of emptiness, that are daily enacted in religious settings, the religiously inflected love of nature and a religiously driven fear about the imminent end of the world. Such feelings of religious persons often are worn on the sleeve. But that does not mean those feelings are readily understandable by observers. Emotion in religion, in fact, has been defined for a very long time as essentially resistant to critical probings. It has been cast as irrational and, as such, insusceptible to scholarly analy sis. There are reasons for that, having to do historically with parochial efforts to protect both the mystery of emotion and the mystery of religion.Popu lar pronouncements of emotion as irrational are equally at home in religious publications and the New York Times. Columnist David Brooks, for example, in a Times op-ed published in early 2015, attempted an argument about morals that was constructed around such an understanding. Opposing what he called the "secularist" approach to morals and community, he hinged his argument against it on his claim that secularists foolishly believe that human john corrigan
INTRODUCTION
How Do We Study Religion and Emotion?Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/524894/9780822372103-001.pdf by guest 2 John Corrigan rationality is itself a good enough guide to moral life. We humans, said Brooks, are irrational and emotional: "We are not really rational animals; emotions play a central role in decision-making." Moreover, it is those irrational emotions that are so much needed by all of us as we make our lives together in the world, because they lead us to "self-transcendence" and they make for an "enchanted" world. He concluded by predicting that secularism will never succeed until, in his words, it "arouses the higher emotions." 1 Ostensibly, there is much in Brooks's piece that resonates with the views of his core readership. Many of them might agree with his characterization of emotions, thinking, "Of course, it's obvious. Emotions are irrational. Some are 'higher emotions.' An emotional life is an enchanted life." For those readers, thinking about emotion, morality, religion, rationality-all those seemingly intertwined topics-presumably takes place within a cocoon of ideological securities and folk wisdom, within a matrix of strongly held ideas about what a person is, what emotion is, and how emotion plays a role in a mysterious pro cess of "transcendence." But conceptualizing the "enchanted life" in such a way is itself a species of magical thinking. Moreover, it is a view that has had its defenders in the acad emy, as well as its proponents in the popu lar press. The En glish anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, addressing the topic in 1965, criticized some of the best-known ...
