PROFESSOR Appiah, the author of this erudite book, gave the Reith Lectures in 2016: “discussing ways in which people’s thinking about religion, nation, race and culture often reflects misunderstandings about identity” (BBC depiction). His father was a distinguished Ghanaian politician who studied in London, where Appiah was born. His maternal grandmother, whom he, as a child, often visited from Ghana, was married to the British politician Sir Stafford Crips.
Now 71 and still speaking with a received English accent, Appiah has spent most of his career in the United States, currently as Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. He is exceptionally well-placed to discuss different forms of identity and religion across Western and African cultures, while remaining agnostic (like many social scientists) about what “religion” actually is.
Most of Captive Gods is taken up with a discussion of the work of four key 19th- and early-20th-century intellectuals who were foundational for the development of modern sociology: Edward Burnett Tylor (usually depicted as an early anthropologist), Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber.
In a concluding chapter, Appiah shows how their ideas have now variously influenced the German sociologists Hans Joas (a practising Roman Catholic) and Helmut Rosa (also a part-time church organist), the rational-choice theorist and highly influential American Rodney Stark, who died in 2022, and the polemical British theologian John Milbank, as well as recent exponents of cognitive science of religion. Appiah makes wise critical appraisals of each of them. He also summarises well the basic ideas and criticisms made of his pioneers of sociology, although anyone already familiar with their writings will find little surprising here, except, perhaps, for his admirable erudition when tracing their various intellectual debts.
The epilogue acknowledges his own intellectual debts, both to his Ghanaian Asante heritage — which makes him suspicious of separating “religion” from life — and to the philosophical group that met in Cambridge when he was a student there, and which included the anti-positivist philosopher Dorothy Emmet, who died in 2000 and to whose memory he dedicates this book. The Epiphany Philosophers, as they were known, lived with their religious differences and taught him how to study religion without necessarily being able to define it or even to belong wholeheartedly to a particular section of it.
Herein lies a problem. He flirts — as did both Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Ninian Smart — with Wittgenstein’s notion of “family resemblance” as a way of defining religion — suggesting that particular families can have a variety of distinguishing features although any member of the family may not have all of the features, nor need all of the members have a single feature in common. Yet he is aware that, while this may work for a human family, especially when it can be tested by DNA, for religion there is no impartial test for establishing its features. For example — as even the pioneers of sociology were aware — belief in God is a common feature of Abrahamic faiths, but not, say, of major sections of Buddhism. And is football or Marxism a “religion”? And who decides?
In other words, neutrality takes us only so far. In contrast, the religiously committed can readily detect features in their own tradition which have similarities with otherwise very different faiths. So, Christian monastics and mystics have long seen similarities to their non-theistic Buddhist counterparts. Max Weber, in particular, struggled with this at a very personal level, depicting himself memorably as “religiously unmusical” while, paradoxically, being extraordinarily nuanced in his approach to different forms of faith and refusing to define himself as either anti-religious or irreligious. In contrast, Durkheim, coming from a long line of rabbis, was more defiant in his secularity.
Appiah’s very tentative conclusions show that he is well aware that this debate still continues within, and divides, Western society. He offers a thoughtful, even if inconclusive, guide. After reading this book, you will come away, thankfully, with more questions than easy answers.
Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent.
Captive Gods: Religion and the rise of social science
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Yale £18.99
(978-0-300-23306-3)
Church House Bookshop £17.09
