Are Religious Experiences Too Private

Are Religious Experiences Too Private to
Study?*
Stephen S. Bush /
Brown University
i. new materialism and the rhetoric of experience

When a charismatic Christian has a religious experience in which she
encounters Jesus as her husband-lover, much about this experience is
public in nature.1 For example, her body is in a particular posture during
the experience, and this posture is observable. Furthermore, if she
should report the experience to anyone, her testimony, whether verbal
or written, is a public matter. And even the concepts she brings with
her into the experience, concepts like Jesus, God, love, and so on, are
public in that they are shared and were acquired through social processes of language learning. But beyond all this, it seems that something
about the experience is private in nature, undergone by her alone,
removed from the public realm. Only she really knows what the event
felt like. Only she knows whether she really had an experience or
whether she is lying about what occurred. Some aspect of the experience
transpires in the privacy of subjective consciousness, a seemingly invisible, inaccessible realm.
This private dimension of religious and mystical experiences has long
posed vexing methodological issues for scholars of religion. Nevertheless, until recently, most have taken it for granted that experiences are
something that we can talk about and theorize. That assumption, however, is increasingly facing a challenge from a new and important approach to religious studies in which attention to discourse, social prac* I delivered an early version of this article at the 2006 annual meeting of the American
Academy of Religion, and Im grateful for the remarks of Robert Sharf and the respondent,
Wayne Proudfoot, on that occasion. I also received helpful suggestions from Charles Matthewes, Josanda Jinnette, Michaelle Jinnette, Nancy Jinnette, two anonymous referees, and
especially Jeffrey Stout.
1
Such experiences are recounted in R. Marie Griffith, Gods Daughters: Evangelical Women
and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
0022-4189/2012/9202-0002$10.00
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The Journal of Religion

tices, power, bodies, and material culture displaces attention to
subjective, phenomenological consciousness. David Chidester coins the
label new materialism to describe this program in a discussion of the
influential text, Critical Terms for Religious Studies.2 In the same vein as
Talal Asads criticism of Clifford Geertz for thinking of religion in mentalistic terms (as a matter of belief ), the contributors to Critical Terms
take aim at everything mental and/or subjective, including experience,
but also such things as consciousness and ideas.3 This perspective is not
limited to the academic study of religion but reflects trends in the humanities and social sciences more broadly. As Seyla Benhabib says, The
paradigm of language has replaced the paradigm of consciousness. This shift
has meant that the focus is no longer on the epistemic subject or on
the private contents of its consciousness but on the public, signifying
activities of a collection of subjects.4
Experience is not faring well in the wake of this paradigm shift.5 For
the most part, the considerations that generate suspicion among scholars against religious experience remain implicit. However, in the work
of scholar of Buddhism Robert H. Sharf, we find one notable attempt
to lay out explicitly the sorts of concerns that could lead one to abandon
subjective experience as a topic of academic study. In his contribution
to Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Experience, and in two related
essays, Sharf takes aim at what he often calls the rhetoric of experience.
2
David Chidester, Material Terms for the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 68, no. 2 (2000): 374; Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
3
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), chap. 1.
4
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 208.
5
In a recent work that is sympathetic to the category of religious experience, Ann Taves
admits that many think that the study of religious experience is passe in an era that has
abandoned experience for discourse about experience. Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009), xiii-xiv. And Harold Roth speaks of a total retreat from
serious consideration of religious experience in religious studies, such that the role of
subjective experience in religion has been totally abandoned as a subject of academic study.
Harold D. Roth, Against Cognitive Imperialism: A Call for a Non-ethnographic Approach
to Cognitive Science and Religious Studies, Religion East & West 8 (2008): 7. Tavess work
provides a valuable service to the study of experience by bringing an impressive range of
psychological and neurological studies into the conversation. However, she does not directly
address the skepticism about the viability of appeals to experience and consciousness that
has come about in the wake of the linguistic turn in the humanities, remaining content just
to acknowledge briefly the skepticism on occasion (e.g., Religious Experience Reconsidered, 5,
84). She engages Sharf, the primary focus of the present essay, at points throughout Religious
Experience Reconsidered, but she never responds to his own arguments in favor of discourse
about experience instead of experience, and she gives the most attention not to his essays
on experience, but to his treatment of ritual in Robert H. Sharf, Ritual, in Critical Terms for
the Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
200
Are Religious Experiences Too Private to Study?

The rhetoric of experience regards religious experiences as being four
things: absolutely private, subjective, indubitable (for the experiencer),
and immediate, in the sense that the experience is independent of the
experiencers concepts and beliefs.6 The rhetoric of experience has
been of tremendous significance in the modern study and practice of
religion, in large part because those promoting the rhetoric, including
figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, Evelyn Underhill, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, have tended to
think of experience as acultural and as the most important aspect of
religion in general. This enables a view of religion as universal, identical
in essence across time, place, and religious tradition. So when confronted by our charismatic Christian woman and her experience of Jesus, Otto and Eliade would think that what she undergoes involves some
sort of universal, transcultural religious sense: for Otto, the sense of the
numinous; for Eliade, the sense of the sacred. Whats more, for Otto
at least, those who have not had an experience cannot obtain any more
than a superficial understanding of the nature of religious experiences.7
Sharf subjects the rhetoric of experience to severe criticism. In keeping
with the new materialist perspective, he directs our attention away from
the nature of any supposed experiences and asks us to consider instead
the ideological functions of an appeal to a universal, experiential religion.
For scholars in the West, such an appeal allows them to grant legitimacy
to non-Christian religions without sacrificing the truthfulness of Christianity. In the Asian context, the rhetoric of experience supported twentieth-century Japanese imperial ambitions against China and the West by
portraying Japanese culture as a unique expression of an experiential
version of Zen.8 Another role the rhetoric serves is to be a key element
of the strategy, both in Europe and Asia, to reconcile religion with modern science and philosophy. This reconciliation bolsters the legitimacy
6
Robert H. Sharf, Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, Numen
42, no. 3 (1995): 22883, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, in Curators of the Buddha: The
Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Experience, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998). Sharfs more recent treatment of experience is found in Sharf, Ritual.
His focus in this essay is on ritual, not experience, and whereas he gives a nonexperiential
interpretation of enlightenment in the context of one particular Buddhist ritual, he does not
make strong claims about experience in general. (His generalizations in this essay concern
ritual, not experience.) To be sure, I will contest nonexperiential interpretations that are
supposed to apply to all narratives and reports of enlightenment, but I have no reason to
contest nonexperiential interpretations of any particular narrative about enlightenment, so I
will leave aside Sharfs Ritual for the purposes of this essay.
7
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the
Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1958), 78.
8
Sharf, Zen of Japanese Nationalism.
201

not only of religion but also, in the West, of the academic study of religion, a field perennially anxious that other disciplines question its place
in the university. Further, on a more local level, particular religious
groups oftentimes authorize themselves and deauthorize others on the
grounds that their leaders and/or members have achieved certain experiential states. So Sharf points to the way in which the rhetoric of
experience advances certain religious and sociopolitical interests, and he
levels critical questions against the way the rhetoric portrays experiences.
In addition, he makes a valuable contribution to the study of religion in
showing how scholars have oftentimes read mystical literature as though
the purpose of the texts was to describe or prescribe particular religious
experiences, whereas in fact the texts had ritual purposes. For example,
Sharf tells us that premodern Buddhists placed little emphasis on the
achievement of altered states of consciousness. Buddhist monks used
scriptural narratives of experiences rituallymemorizing them, reciting
them, and revering them as talismansrather than treating them as a
guide for the achievement of extraordinary mental episodes. Evidence
from actual monastic practices suggests that the performance of liturgical
rituals, the cultivation of virtue, and the study of scripture were the primary uses of the texts, not the attainment of pure experience.9
My central aim in this essay is to investigate Sharfs criticisms of the
rhetoric of experience, hoping that in the engagement between the
new materialist perspective and the rhetoric of experience, we will find
insights about how we can best conduct our scholarly investigation of
religious experience. For the sake of clarity, I will throughout this essay
consistently use the term rhetoric of experience to refer to a particular
conception of religious experience, one that attributes to experiences
the four qualities mentioned above: privacy, subjectivity, indubitability,
and immediacy. Some might think that experience by definition involves
those qualities, but a guiding assumption of my inquiry is that this is
not necessarily the case. So I will consistently use the term category
of experience to refer to religious experiences more generically, without presupposing that experiences are as the rhetoric says they are:
private, subjective, indubitable, and immediate. (But neither does my
use of the term category of experience presuppose from the outset
that experiences are not as the rhetoric says they are.) I use the term
category of experience to refer to experiences however one might
plausibly conceive them. Likewise, when I speak of the study of religious experience, I will mean inquiry into the nature of religious ex9
Sharf, Buddhist Modernism, 241.
202

perience however experiences are construed, whether in the manner
of the rhetoricians of experience or in some other manner. What is
important to me with these terminological issues is to distinguish one
particular way of conceiving experience, that of the rhetoricians of
experience, from other possible conceptions.
I acknowledge that Sharf makes many legitimate points against the
rhetoric of experience, and I appreciate his points that mystical texts
often have ritualistic uses, as opposed to psychological ones, and that
experience reports are shaped by and contribute to ideological aims.
However, Sharfs essays, and the new materialist perspective more generally, exhibit tendencies that, if followed to their logical conclusion,
could lead to the elimination of the category of experience from religious studies. While I am not out to defend the rhetoric of experience,
I do wish to defend the category and study of experience from the
tendencies in new materialism that would disparage the category of
experience. Even so, I readily admit that the new materialists criticism
forces us to reconceptualize experience in quite different terms from
the rhetoric of experience.
ii. sharf and experience
Sharf advances historical and ethnographic arguments against the rhetoric of experience, but the core of his position is a philosophical challenge concerning what it takes for a word to have meaning and to be
able to refer. Referring, in the philosophy of language, pertains to the
relationship between words or sentences, on the one hand, and objects
or states of affairs, on the other. We use words and sentences to talk
about, that is, refer to, things; so, for instance, the word dog refers
to a member of a particular class of mammals (or the class itself ). In
Sharfs estimation, for a word to be meaningful and capable of referring, that to which the word refers has to be public in nature. But if
experiences are as the rhetoric of experience takes them to be, immediate episodes of consciousness, then there is nothing public for
terms such as experience to refer to. So Sharf says, If talk of shamanic
experience, mystical experience, or what have you is to have any sort
of determinate meaning, we must construe the term experience in
referential or ostensive terms. But to do so is to objectify it, which would
seem to undermine its most salient characteristic, namely, its immediacy.
So we are posed with a dilemma: experience cannot be determinate
without being rendered a thing; if it is a thing it cannot be indubitable;
203

but if it is not a thing, then it cannot perform the hermeneutic task
that religious scholars require of itthat of determining meaning.10
Now it is one thing to say that a scholarly concept exhibits vagueness:
that is, there are borderline cases in which it is not clear whether the
concept applies and perhaps no objective, principled way of determining whether or not it does. Many, perhaps all, concepts are like this,
but they still have analytical utility because despite the gray areas at the
borders, there are clear cases in which the concept does apply, especially
the paradigmatic ones, and clear cases in which it does not apply. (We
may not be sure that this collection of sand in front of us is a heap,
but that huge pile over there clearly is and that scattering of grains
over there clearly is not.) Sharfs claim is not that experience is devoid
of determinate semantic content in this weaker sense, in that it is vague
at the borders. His claim is far more thorough: The category experience is, in essence, a mere placeholder that entails a substantive if
indeterminate terminus for the relentless deferral of meaning, and,
borrowing a turn of phrase from Samuel Beckett, All attempts to signify
inner experience are destined to remain well-meaning squirms that
get us nowhere.11
So Sharfs opinion on one count seems straightforward enough: If
experiences are as the rhetoric of experience says they are, then the
terms that supposedly refer to psychological episodes cannot actually
do so, and further, the term experience itself and its cognates are not
sufficiently meaningful to serve as a useful concept for scholarly purposes. This much is clear, but on several other matters, questions
emerge as to just how to interpret his claims. For one thing, is Sharf
criticizing the category of experience in general, or is he only criticizing
one particular way of conceptualizing experience? If Sharf only has the
rhetoric of experience in mind, then it is only that conception of experience that faces the threat that its key term is meaningless. Sharf
tends to use the terms rhetoric of experience and experience simpliciter interchangeably, leaving us to wonder whether his target is experience as conceived by the rhetoricians of experience or experience
under any conception. On the one hand, if he thinks experiences could
occur without the four characteristics that the rhetoricians of experience attribute to them, then his critical remarks against experience
only apply to the rhetoric of experience, and for other conceptualizations of experience, there might be no problem at all with the meaningfulness of experience terms. On the other hand, if he intends for
10
11
Sharf, Experience, 104.

Ibid., 11314.
204

his criticisms to apply not just to the rhetoric of experience, but to the
category of experience itself, then the scholarly study of experience
looks to be in considerable trouble.
One thing that would help clear things up is a concise definition of
what Sharf, as opposed to the rhetoricians of experience, thinks experience is. Sharf does give a definition, but it leaves the crucial questions unanswered. He says that he is not concerned with the sense of
the term as in I have combat experience, since the referent of the
term would seem to lie in the social or public sphere, but rather his
discussion applies to the sense of the term that means to directly
perceive, observe, be aware of, or be conscious of. He says of this
sense that there is a tendency to think of experience as a subjective
mental event or inner process that eludes public scrutiny.12 Sharf
notes that thinking of experience as an inner process or mental event
owes much to Rene Descartes, the famous mind-matter dualist. But
whatever tendencies there are to think of experience like this, clearly
Descartess account of perception and observation is not the only one.
It makes perfect sense to say I observed (or perceived) a fender bender
on my way to work this morning. Nothing commits the speaker of that
sort of utterance to mind-body dualism. Then there is the question of
how we should take the term direct when Sharf says to experience is
to directly perceive? Should we think that experience, by definition,
occurs in private interiority and so is inescapably Cartesian? Or are
there other ways to think of perceptual experience that do not commit
us to Cartesianism?
These unsettled matters leave us with two possible interpretations of
Sharfs position and, correspondingly, two proposals as to how we
should best conceive of experience. In one of them, which I shall call
the modest interpretation, Sharf is not arguing against the category of
experienceexperiences however we might conceive themjust
against the rhetoric of experienceexperiences conceived of as private,
subjective, indubitable, and immediate. In the modest interpretation,
Sharf holds that if we conceive of experience like the rhetoricians of
experience, then the term experience does not have what it takes to
be a sufficiently meaningful term. Beyond that, however, Sharf has no
real complaints about the category of experience, so long as it is understood on different terms than the rhetoric of experience, and he
has no real complaints about the study of religious experience and
mysticism, if conducted under different terms than the rhetoric of experience. If this is the correct way to interpret Sharfs arguments, then
12
Ibid., 104.
205

the principal problem with his essay is that he fails to consider or discuss
other conceptions of experience besides the rhetoric of experience,
leaving the impression, even if he does not intend to, that the study of
experience stands or falls with the rhetoric of experience. Some might
think that the main contribution of his essay to the study of religious
experience is somewhat limited if the essay only advances the modest
thesis, since the rhetoric of experience has already been roundly criticized by Steven Katz, Wayne Proudfoot, and others in the late 1970s
and 1980s. This is not right, though. Sharf confronts the rhetoric of
experience from a novel point of view, challenging the rhetorics assumption that experience terms can meaningfully refer to experiential
episodes. If, as the modest interpretation holds, the category and study
of experience are viable under different assumptions than those of the
rhetoric of experience, then one main task facing us after Sharfs criticisms is to provide a theory of religious experience that accounts for
the meaning and reference of experience terms.
Certain elements of Sharfs essay indicate that he has something more
ambitious in mind than the modest interpretation. In what I will call
the ambitious interpretation, Sharf is not just out to debunk the rhetoric
of experience, he is out to debunk the category of experience itself.
Sharf is arguing not merely that the rhetoric of experience entails the
meaninglessness of the term experience, but also that the rhetoric of
experience is the only viable way to construe experience. If this is the
case, then the category of experience stands or falls with the rhetoric
of experience, and since things are not looking good for the rhetoric
of experience, the category of experience finds itself on the shakiest
of ground. If experience is as the rhetoric of experience says it is, then
the term experience cannot perform the hermeneutic task that religious scholars require of itthat of determining meaning, as it cannot possess any possible discursive meaning or signification.13
Three considerations suggest that the ambitious interpretation is the
right way to understand Sharf. First, as already mentioned, Sharf does
not give any real consideration to alternatives to the rhetoric of experience but rather speaks as though the rhetoric of experience is the
only game in town. Second, if Sharfs project is as the modest interpretation says it is, then his work would align closely with the constructivist perspective on religious experiences, yet he explicitly distances
himself from that perspective. The constructivists, especially Wayne
Proudfoot and Steven Katz, have produced highly influential works arguing that experiences are necessarily mediated by concepts. In doing
13
Ibid., 104, 114.
206

so, they have swayed a great number of scholarly opinions against the
rhetoric of experience. Rather than aligning himself with this perspective, Sharf poses a provocative challenge to the constructivists when he
says, The constructivists seem to assume that since the historical, social,
and linguistic processes that give rise to the narrative representation
are identical with those that give rise to the experience, the former,
which are amenable to scholarly analysis, provide a transparent window
to the latter. Sharf rejects this as a failure to grasp the rhetorical logic
of appeals to experience. The constructivist thinks she can talk about
experiences in terms other than those used by the rhetoricians of experience, but Sharf rebuts: The category experience is, in essence, a
mere placeholder that entails a substantive if indeterminate terminus
for the relentless deferral of meaning.14 Elsewhere, Sharf notes that
both constructivists and their opponents assume that experience and
related terms refer to mental episodes of some sort but seems to exclude
himself from the constructivist camp: It should now be apparent that
the question is not merely whether or not mystical experiences are
constructed, unmediated, pure, or philosophically significant. The
more fundamental question is whether we can continue to treat the
texts and reports upon which such theories are based as referring,
however obliquely, to any determinate phenomenal events at all.15
Sharfs implied answer to this fundamental question is clearly no,
and the surrounding context makes it clear that he is referring to an
extraordinarily wide variety of mystical reports, from various cultures,
religions, and times. The section of his essay in which he poses the
question of whether texts and reports refer to any determinate phenomenal events begins with a hypothetical objection to his overarching
argument: Those Buddhist meditators are clearly experiencing something in the midst of their ascetic ordeals, even if they cannot ultimately
agree on whether it should be called jhana, sotapatti, kensho, or whatever. The objector continues, widening her scope from Buddhism to
other religions, The vigorous and often exuberant language used by
mystics the world over to describe their visions, trances, and states of
cosmic union must refer to something.16 Sharf makes it clear he means
to deny the objectors suggestion, as he responds, This objection attests
once again to our deep entanglement in the Cartesian paradigm.17 He
then states his intent to avoid the hoary disputes of philosophy of
mind and appeal to ethnographic evidence instead. The ethnographic
14
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
17
Ibid.,
15
16
113.
103, 110.
107.
1078.
207

evidence involves reports of alien abduction, and Sharf suggests that
the right approach to the widespread reports of abduction is skepticism.
Not just skepticism that what the abductees said happened actually
happened, but skepticism regarding whether anything at all, even of a
very different nature than the abductees suppose, happened. The
scholarly consensus would seem to be that the abductions simply did
not take place; there is no originary event behind the memories.18 This
is plausible enough, and surely many religious experience reports, historical and contemporary, are fabrications without basis in any event
of any nature. But Sharfs next moves are too hasty. He notes that UFO
abduction reports are similar in respects to religious-experience reports
and that therapists fulfill a similar function toward the abductees as
priests do toward laymen and laywomen. These tenuous comparisons
provide the occasion for Sharf to engage in a broad generalization:
The question is unavoidable: Is there any reason to assume that the
reports of experiences by mystics, shamans, or meditation masters are
any more credible as phenomenological descriptions than those of
the abductees?19 The question is rhetorical, but we can be sure that
Sharfs implied answer is no. The fact that he has presented the case
of UFO abductions in response to an objector who thinks religious
experience reports must refer to something suggests that Sharf wants
us to believe that religious experience reports as such do not refer and
have no originary event.
We find a third mark in favor of the ambitious interpretation in the
hints Sharf drops about his own constructive proposal for the proper
way to study religious experience. These hints are one of the places we
see Sharfs agenda most clearly. He says, It is a mistake to approach
literary, artistic, or ritual representations as if they referred back to
something other than themselves, to some numinous inner realm.20
And, It is ill conceived to construe the object of the study of religion
to be the inner experience of religious practitioners. Scholars of religion are not presented with experiences that stand in need of interpretation but rather with texts, narratives, performances, and so forth.
While these representations may at times assume the rhetorical stance
of phenomenological description, we are not obliged to accept them
as such. On the contrary, we must remain alert to the ideological implications of such a stance.21 Sharf cautions us not to take represen18
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
Ibid.,
21
Ibid.,
19
20
208
109.
110.
113.
111.

tations of experiences as referring to any cognitive or emotional episodes but rather to restrict our attention to the representations
themselves. The representation, such as an oral or literary report of an
experience, is the proper object of study for the scholar, not anything
to which the report might refer. Presumably, if we follow the lead of
Sharfs own scholarship, we are to attend especially to the ideological
functions that such a report plays: the way in which it authorizes certain
individuals, religious groups, and even whole cultures and deauthorizes
others. The stricture that Sharf places on the scholar of religious experience, that the legitimate objects of her inquiry are only the representations of experiences, and not any experiences themselves, is incompatible with the modest interpretation. If Sharfs take on things
were as the modest interpretation says, then he could oppose the rhetoric of experience but still countenance some other way of conceiving
experiences that regards them as episodes of awareness of some sort,
just not absolutely private, subjective, indubitable, and nonconceptual.
Further, he could grant that terms such as experience meaningfully
refer to such episodes. However, this is not the option Sharf pursues,
and so his remarks about how we are to study experience reports are
out of joint with the modest thesis.
Despite these considerations, it is not easy to tell whether Sharf is a
wholehearted proponent of the ambitious thesis or whether the passages that support that reading are merely tendencies in the direction
of the ambitious interpretation but not a fully developed position. To
add further complication to the matter, Sharfs position in Buddhist
Modernism is hard to reconcile with some of the statements he makes
in Experience. Sharf seems to say in Experience that religious experience reports universally do not refer to any sort of episode of conscious awareness, whereas in Buddhist Modernism he restricts this
claim to one particular type of literature: the elaborate discourse on
meditative states found in Buddhist scholastic sources.22 In that essay,
he also acknowledges that we cannot rule out the possibility that at
least some monks in times past did in fact experience what we might
refer to as altered states of consciousness, transformative insights,
mystical experiences, or what have you in the course of their monastic
practice.23 In Experience, he presents and dispenses with the view
that the mystics language must refer to something, counseling, It is
a mistake to approach literary, artistic, or ritual representations as if
22
23

Ibid., 259.
209

they referred back to something other than themselves.24 In contrast,
he admits in Buddhist Modernism that
there would appear to be ample evidence that those involved in the vipassana
revival, or those training under Zen teachers in the Sanbokyodan lineage, do
experience something that they are wont to call sotapatti, jhana, or satori. I readily
concede this point; indeed, it would be surprising if those who subjected themselves to the rigors of a Buddhist meditation retreat, which can involve upwards
of fourteen hours of meditation a day in an excruciatingly uncomfortable crosslegged posture, sometimes in an underground cell utterly devoid of sound and
light, would not undergo some unusual and potentially transformative experiences.25
So in Buddhist Modernism, Sharf maintains a view much like my own,

which strives to acknowledge both that experiences of some sort do
occur and that they and their reports can have political implications,
whereas in Experience, he makes suggestions that indicate that we
must forego discussion of the experiences themselves and focus instead
on discourse about experience.
So I cannot confidently assign to Sharf either the modest or ambitious
interpretation. This is not cause for concern, however, because for my
purposes, it is not important what Sharfs settled conviction is. Whatever
Sharf thinks, his essay is an occasion to reflect on the past and future
of the study of experience and examine what possibilities exist and what
pitfalls we should avoid. Sharf raises powerful concerns about whether
and how language can refer to religious experiences, and we need to
think through how best to respond to the issues he raises. The constructivist approach to religious experience has had much to say against
the rhetoric of experience, but the constructivists have not themselves
taken on the topic that Sharf brings to the forefront: how can language,
which is essentially public, meaningfully refer to private psychological
episodes. Whether or not Sharf endorses the ambitious thesis, there
are at least moments in his text that exhibit strong tendencies toward
it, and these tendencies are present among others who gravitate toward
the new materialist perspective as well.26 My concern is to track carefully
where these tendencies lead and, regardless of what Sharfs settled opinion is, to pose the question of whether the rest of us should adopt the
modest interpretation or the ambitious one. This decision matters a
great deal, especially since the ambitious interpretation is, if not en24
Sharf, Experience, 107, 113.

26
See, e.g., Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 910; and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Belief,
in Critical Terms for Religious Studies.
25
210

tailed by new materialism, at least a characteristic temptation of that
approach. If the ambitious interpretation is correct, then the category
of experience is irredeemably Cartesian, and so the term experience
cannot meaningfully refer to that to which it purports to refer. But this
is to render the category of experience worthless for scholarship on
religion. Scholars and people generally must have some idea of what
they are talking about when they use a word, if they are to communicate
with one another successfully, but experience, in the ambitious interpretation, defies such an understanding. It seems to follow straightforwardly from these views that we cannot study the experiential dimension
of religion. To be sure, scholars can study reports of experience and
the social effects of such reports, but under the ambitious interpretation, they have no conceptual resources to discuss the experiences
themselves as things that could occur and have effects in the life of the
experiencer or his religious community. The implications of the ambitious thesis for religious studies are far-reaching indeed.
iii. phenomenology and ontology
The widespread disrepute in which religious experience finds itself
among scholars has a lot to do with the turns to language and practice,
turns from consciousness as a principal methodological locus. I do not
wish to downplay the importance of these turns, but in themselves they
should not be enough to generate the level of suspicion now directed
against the categories of religious experience and mysticism. Important
philosophers and cultural theorists have given accounts of conscious
awareness and perception that acknowledge and endorse the turns to
language and practice. Robert Brandom, for example, does so as an
analytic and pragmatist philosopher and Iris Marion Young does so
while drawing from Continental philosophical traditions of phenomenology and poststructuralism.27 Indeed, a comprehensive proposal for
a viable notion of religious experience, which is more than I will attempt
in this essay, could very well draw from people like Brandom and Young.
In the meantime, I want to suggest that a major factor in the decline
of religious experience, above and beyond the turns to language and
practice, is the reluctance of scholars of religious experience to deal
with ontological issues surrounding religious and mystical experiences.
Advocates of the rhetoric of experience especially have wanted to turn
27
Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Iris Marion Young, On Female Body Experience:
Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays, Studies in Feminist Philosophy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
211

our attention away from the question of what is actually being experienced and the question of whether the purported object of the experience even exists. The ontological questions, questions about what
exists, are put to the side in order to focus on the phenomenal qualities
of the experience: what the experience feels like for the experiencer.28
Indeed, one of the most significant methodological perspectives to
promote the rhetoric of experience is that of the phenomenologists of
religion, who are explicit in their refusal to consider the ontological
questions. They insist that we bracket the question of the existential
status of the purported object of the experience. For example, according to Ninian Smart, the task of the phenomenologist of religion is to
describe what the religious practitioner undergoes in practicing religion: such things as what people feel, the impact of the Focus upon
them, the performative and expressive nature of the language of worship and prayer. (The Focus being Smarts term for any religious
object toward which religious rites, feelings, and beliefs are directed.)
But Smart insists that the phenomenologist must bracket the existence
of the Focus: The question of existence does not arise in this methodological framework.29 So phenomenologists of religion like Smart
have a principled refusal to account for the cause of an experience in
discussing the nature of the experience. The motive in avoiding this
issue may be admirable, in that the rhetoricians do not want to pass
judgment on the religious beliefs of the people they are studying. They
want to assess, for example, the nature of a charismatic or Pentecostal
Christians experience of Jesus without broaching the subject of
whether Jesus actually exists in the here and now. The phenomenologists bracket the object of the experience, thinking they can regard as
irrelevant the question of whether what the experiencers thought they
were experiencing really does exist and really was being experienced.
However, the phenomenologists strategy leaves them susceptible to just
the sorts of criticisms that Sharf advances. By separating the question
of the nature of the experience from the cause of the experience, the
rhetoric of experience cannot but portray experiences as radically subjective. The phenomenological accountthe description of what the
experience is likegets the first and last word as to the nature of the
experience. This necessitates thinking of experiences as absolutely sub28
Two notable texts that helpfully emphasize the need to attend to causes and objects of
experiences are Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985); Peter Byrne, Mysticism, Identity, and Realism: A Debate Reviewed, International Journal
for Philosophy of Religion 16, no. 3 (1984): 23743.
29
Ninian Smart, The Phenomenon of Religion (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973), 62, 67.
212

jective and private and thus leads naturally to the sorts of worries about
the rhetoric of experience that Sharf airs.
In contrast, to focus on the ontology involved in the experience, in
addition to its phenomenology, means regarding the experience as an
event in a causal process and paying attention to the causal origins (and
also the effects) of religious experiences. An ordinary perceptual experience can be considered in subjective terms: we can speak of the way
the color of a mug appears, the way the stroke of a hand feels, or the
way a bell sounds. However, we can also speak of these occurrences as
events in a causal process that involves, for example, light emitting from
a source, reflecting off the surface of the mug, striking the retinal cells,
and generating neural signals to the visual cortex. The physical properties
of the object, in combination with the properties of human physiological
and neurophysiological systems, make the experience what it is.
The fact that we can treat ordinary perceptual experiences as causal
processes in which the object of the experience exists and plays a crucial
role in determining the nature of the experience ensures that we have
a way to refer linguistically to perceptual experiences. A visual perceptual experience involves the causal process of reflected light stimulating
our nervous system. Our linguistic facilities are perfectly capable of
referring to causal processes of this sort and to the events that constitute
the process, and they were even before modern science came to understand visual perception in terms of photons and photoreceptor cells.
What is the problem, then, with religious experiences? Red objects,
as Sharf would no doubt remind us, are publicly accessible, whereas
God and Buddhist enlightenment are not. But on second thought, the
public accessibility of the object of the experience might not be what
makes or breaks the meaningfulness of the experience terms. Imagine
a world in which only one glass of beer had ever been or would ever
be produced, only one person drank that glassful, and she did it in
private. Would it be that she hadnt tasted beer? Would the phrase
experienced the flavor of beer be meaningless and incapable of referring to the event in which she drank the beer? Surely not.
Religious experiences, however, pose additional problems besides
their privacy. What singles out certain events and not others as religious
experiences is that religious experiences are episodes or states that
people report (whether rightly or wrongly) as involving awareness of
some sort of religious object, such as a god, spirit, ghost, ancestor,
extraordinary state of being, or emotion. The physical items we perceive
are generally uncontroversial in their existence. This is hardly the case
when it comes to what religious practitioners experience. The phenomenologists of religion sought to avoid controversies about the existence
213

of religious beings and states by treating them as though they were
irrelevant to the subjective, phenomenological qualities of the experience.
If, however, we are going to regard a religious experience as an event
in a causal sequence of events, the question about the objects or conditions that bring about the experience is unavoidable. The best way
to address this challenge is to recognize four possible options for how
to interpret any experience. These options are to regard the experience
as a fabrication (a report corresponding to no experience whatsoever),
an illusion, a hallucination, or a veridical event. We can consider examples such as those given in Marie Griffiths ethnographic study of
charismatic Christians, Gods Daughters. Griffith tells of one woman who
experiences God as liquid love and hears God speak to her heart,
saying, Your life is a miracle of my love, and another whose encounter
with the divine is as extreme heat surging through her body.30 In
regard to these sorts of reported experiences, we can appeal to any of
the four options to specify what may have happened to the Christian:
Perhaps she fabricated the report, for whatever reason, whether deceptively or sincerely as a result of faulty memory. Perhaps she hallucinated that God was speaking to her.31 Perhaps she mistook one thing
for another, an occurrence we would call an illusion. That is, maybe
she regarded a thought of her own or an aspect of her imagination as
a message from God. Judging the experience to be an illusion of this
or some other sort frees the third-person interpreter to theorize about
the real nature of the causal process that the believer supposes to originate in God. Such theories might come in any number of varieties:
Feuerbachian projection theories; Freudian, Lacanian, or Irigarayan
psychoanalytic theories; Marxist deprivation theories; Durkheimian social theories; contemporary neuroscientific theories; or what have you.
And finally, some might, like the experiencer herself, regard the experience as veridical or at least possibly so. Theologians and those who
are agnostic about Gods existence might be willing to consider as a
possible option that God really did manifest to the Christian as a sensation of liquid love and really did convey a message to her. (In this
case, the person who judges the experience to be veridical is committed
to the existence of God, but not all judgments that an experience is
veridical need involve a commitment to supernaturalism. Religious naturalists, who countenance religious experiences of strictly natural ori30
Griffith, Gods Daughters, 81, 108.

For a non-Cartesian account of hallucination, see Mark Johnston, The Obscure Object
of Hallucination, Philosophical Studies 120 (2004): 11883.
31
214

gins, could regard an experience of purely natural origins as religious
and veridical, but not supernatural.)
In the first case, fabrication, obviously the phrase an experience of
God as liquid love does not refer to anything, as no such event occurred
(although the fact that the phrase does not refer to anything real does
not indicate that it is meaningless, any more than unicorn or Sherlock Holmes is meaningless). However, in the cases of hallucinations,
illusions, and veridical events, it seems unproblematic to regard the
phrase as referring to something. If the Christian underwent a hallucination or an illusion of some sort, an event of some nature still occurred. She was affected by her own physiological state and indeed,
sensed that state, but mistook the object of her sensation as something
other than her own physiological state. To experience something, I do
not have to recognize accurately what it is that I am experiencing. If I
report seeing Frank whereas I have really seen a look-alike, I have still
had a visual experience of someone, just not who I thought it was. The
Christians mistake does not detract from the fact that an event occurred, and it does not detract from our ability to refer to the event.
In the fourth possibility, the veridical event, again our conditions for
what it takes for a term to refer meaningfully are met. Here God is
affecting the Christian, and she is reporting having sensed God. The
event occurs and there is no reason we cannot linguistically and meaningfully refer to it.
Even if we cannot be sure for any given occurrence whether what
happened was a hallucination, an illusion, or a veridical event, we can
still suppose that something occurred, label it an experience, and then
discuss the likelihood that it was one or the other of the possibilities
and talk about the nature of the experience in each case. Of course,
no one can know but the Christian herself (and if memory fails, not
even her) whether she has fabricated the report out of nothing. No
doubt in many cases fabrication is the origin of religious experience
reports. But only if we think that hallucinations and illusions never
occur and that supernatural objects do not exist will we think that all
religious experience reports are fabrications. Whatever one thinks
about supernatural experiences, it strains credulity to suppose that hallucinations and illusions do not happen.
By speaking not just of the phenomenologywhat the experience is
likebut also of the real and purported object of the experience, we
bring the experience out of the recesses of unassailable interiority and
situate it soundly within material and social practices. These practices
include and involve the experiencers body, bringing into view the body
both as an entity that performs postures, gestures, and speech acts and
215

as an entity that is constituted by organs and nerves, a physiological
system that can produce emotional states and hallucinatory episodes.
These are the sorts of things to which language can and does refer
meaningfully all the time.
It is worth noting that in all of this, the scholar of religious experience
is not in altogether a dissimilar situation from anthropologists and historians who study reports of nonreligious and nonsupernatural occurrences that the scholar is not in a position to verify directly. Historians
and anthropologists who work with oral traditions, for example, especially face this challenge. A historian who is confronted with an oral
account of the tribal history of the Kuba (of present-day Democratic
Republic of the Congo) and wants to determine the historical accuracy
of the account has no evidence for much of what the oral account
relays. In such a situation, the historian assumes that the oral tradition
is affected by the personal interests of the individuals recounting the
tradition and the social interests of the group whose tradition it is. In
the Kuba testimony, the recounting of the places where the Kuba migrated is intended to establish the reliability of the person giving the
testimony, so it is likely to be historically accurate (by the lights of
academic historiography), whereas the testimony of the martial exploits
of the tribe and its kings have a political purpose of supporting the
reputation of the Kuba and deserve greater skepticism. In any case, as
one distinguished historian of oral traditions puts it, It is usually impossible to provide absolute proof that distortion has taken place. One
can only hazard guesses as to the probabilities, lesser or greater, of the
text being distorted. And in order to assess these probabilities it is
advisable in every case to find out what the reasons for distortion may
have been.32 The scholar of religious experiences, too, is hazarding
guesses about probabilities as to what really happened in regard to a
reported religious experience, except that scholars who reject the possibility of supernatural occurrences will assign a probability of zero to
the possibility that a supernatural experience report is veridical,
whereas scholars with a different presupposition will countenance a
higher probability to such a report. In sum, religious experiences,
though they have their own complications, pose no insurmountable
theoretical problems.
32
Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine
Transaction, 2006), 77, 8081.
216

iv. sharfs historicist argument about the legitimacy of the
concept of religious experience
Even if our language can meaningfully refer to religious experiences,
however, we still have questions about the suitability of the term experience for cross-cultural application. This is a question Sharf takes
up as well, and here again his discussion displays tendencies that indicate dismissiveness toward the category of experience.
A significant portion of Sharfs essay is dedicated to tracing the historical origins of the concept of religious experience. What Sharf does
is show how Japanese and European intellectuals invented a particular
notion of experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in
order to subjectivize their religions, rendering them compatible with
modernity by downplaying the institutional, ritual, and superstitious
elements of traditional Buddhism and Christianity. This process was ideological through and through, in that the subjectivized Buddhism supported the cause of Japanese imperialism and the subjectivized Christianity undergirded European colonial projects by covertly installing
liberal Christianity as the prototypical instance of the newly universal
category, religion.33 This is a story that needs to be told, and Sharf makes
a valuable contribution to the study of religion for telling it.
However, Sharf at times implies that the fact that the terms experience and mysticism arise in particular historical contexts delegitimizes their application to other contexts. For example, he counsels, It
is thus incumbent upon us to reject the perennialist hypothesis insofar
as it anachronistically imposes the recent and ideologically laden notion
of religious experience on our interpretations of premodern phenomena.34 However, the mere fact that a concept has a historically and
culturally specific point of origin neither invalidates the concept nor
invalidates its application to other contexts. Indeed, all our concepts
have historically and culturally specific points of origin, and yet we apply
many of them to other contexts without a catch, so long as we do not
imply that language users in the other contexts employ the concept in
the same manner we do. So while I agree with Sharf that the rhetoric
of experience and its assumption that experiences have an identical
cross-cultural common core deserves criticism, I am not convinced
that the fact that the term experience is of recent origin is itself a
strike against the application of the term to premodern contexts. In33
Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was
Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
34
Sharf, Experience, 98.
217

deed, even in registering his complaint, Sharf applies a recent term to
a prior historical context in identifying an era as premodern.
Merely demonstrating that a concept is historically specific or that it
has been subject to ideological uses is not enough to invalidate that
concept. If one wants to dispose of a concept, one must first identify
the concepts significant faults, whether of an ideological nature (that
is, it covertly produces effects of domination) or of a factual nature.
Further, one must show that these errors are so central and intrinsic
to the concept that the concept is incorrigible; any attempt to reconfigure the concept to avoid the faults would leave it useless (or change
its meaning altogether). Oftentimes this is the case, like phlogiston
and aether and also for derogatory slurs. The fault they employ is
their whole raison detre, so they cannot survive correction. Closer to
home, we have come to be keenly aware of the damage wrought, and
ignoble interests served, by the employment of certain categories once
commonplace to the anthropology of religion, such as Oriental, uncivilized, primitive, savage, and so forth. Scholars bear a serious
responsibility to reflect carefully and critically on the categories they
use, the biases and assumptions built into those categories, and the
interests served by particular ways of categorizing. In these cases, the
concepts are rightly repudiated. In many cases, however, a concept has
enough legitimate uses to be worth preserving even when it contains
errors. If saying X is a man licenses the inference X is unfit for the
tasks of rearing children and keeping house or saying Y is a woman
licenses the inference Y is incapable of political judgment, as has been
and often still is the case, then this is not to say that the concepts should
be retired from use. We can contest the faulty inferences, and meanwhile, the identification of someone as a man or woman can still license
many other useful and correct inferences. My own judgment is that
despite the ideological uses to which religious experience and mysticism
have been put and despite the faulty inferences the terms have licensed
(If Z is a religious experience, then experiences of the same nature
as Z are present in all religions and are the most important aspect of
the religions), the terms are worthy of correction and survival. At the
very least, certainly no one has successfully identified the ethical or
factual faults that are so central to the concepts so as to make them
incorrigible.
v. the study of experience after the rhetoric of experience
A lot is at stake here. The fact of the matter is that people do report
undergoing episodes that we can properly classify as religious experi-
218

ences. In fact, in every major religious tradition, a great number of
practitioners report that they have had episodes in which they were
aware of a god, spirit, ghost, saint, ancestor, or something else extraordinary. Whats more, they quite often attribute great significance to
these episodes: they seek them, long for them, avoid them, fear them,
doubt and second-guess them, risk their lives on account of them, kill
on account of them, profess to be changed by them, labor to achieve
them, profess to encounter them unexpectedly, and so on. To use one
term, such as experience, to apply to all these various types of episodes
of awareness in different religious traditions is not to suppose that there
is anything universal in the phenomenology of the experiences. Rather,
it allows us to ask a whole set of interesting questions within a particular
tradition and across different traditions. These include the questions
Sharf wants to ask about the ways in which discourse about experience
authorizes and legitimizes certain individuals and groups. But we can
ask a host of other pertinent questions as well: Do experiences foster
group solidarity? Does group solidarity foster experiences? Do experiences shape the institutions and rituals of a religious community? In
what ways are they shaped by the institutions and rituals? Do similar
social and material conditions bring about experiences in different cultures and religious traditions? Do experiences produce similar social
effects in different cultures and religious traditions? Are experiences
more common among certain social groups than others? Do experiences affect the status of one social group over against others? Do
experiences foster increased commitment to and participation in religious practices? Do increased commitment to and participation in religious practices foster experiences? Do experiences help people overcome illness or psychological distress? Do experiences bring about
illness or psychological distress? Do experiences affect how one views
the gods or spirits of ones religion? Do experiences affect how one
views the institutions and hierarchies of ones religion? Do experiences
have emancipatory potential for oppressed groups? Do they quell resistance to oppressors? Do they contribute to the growth of a religious
movement? And so on. All of these are questions that should be of
great interest to scholars of religion.35
The rhetoric of experiencewith its assumptions that experiences
are private and immediatedoes not help us in conducting such inquiries. It assumes that experiences are universal across cultures and
35
It would be premature to suppose from the outset that religious experiences were mere
epiphenomena of other social forces, with no causality of their own. This isnt to deny or
downplay the social precursors that elicit experiences, just to say that the presence of experiences can make a difference in individuals and social groups.
219

so predisposes us to miss the variety of effects experiences bring about.
Further, it privileges the interior subjectivity of the practitioner and so
directs our attention away from social structures such as class, gender,
race, and ethnicity in which experiences occur, all the more so since
the rhetoric of experience treats experiences as though they were unaffected by sociopolitical power.36 By privileging experience as the preeminent category among all those at the scholars disposal, the rhetoric
directs our attention away not only from the social categories just mentioned, but a whole host of other categories besides, such as ritual,
artifact, and material culture.
But if the rhetoric of experience and the school most closely associated with it, the phenomenology of religion, misdirect the study of
experience, then some of the proposals we find within new materialism
do as well. Sharfs counsel is that it is a mistake to approach literary,
artistic, or ritual representations as if they referred back to something
other than themselves. He is correct that we need to attend to the
social effects produced by representations of experience. However, we
lose too much if we restrict ourselves to representations and reports of
experiences as opposed to the experiences themselves. It is a mistake
to treat experiences the way the rhetoric of experience does: as absolutely private subjective episodes that serve as the basis for what is universal and most authentic in religiosity in general. It is equally a mistake,
however, to lose our capacity to study and theorize the episodes that
so many adherents report as awareness of gods, spirits, nirvana, or something else.
We can return to Marie Griffiths Gods Daughters to see a prime example of the value of scholarship that attends carefully to the experiences people have and that places these experiences in the context of
the power structures inherent in the religious practitioners society. In
Gods Daughters, Griffith gives special treatment to the manner in which
the doctrine that women are to submit to male authority functions in
the lives of the women. She finds that within the overall context of
subordination, which is disempowering, the women employ a number
of strategies and tactics to elevate their own status, to care for other
women and receive care from them, to bolster their self-esteem, and
to criticize and reform behavior of men, especially husbands. Religious
experience is an essential element in the empowerment their religion
offers them; in particular, experiences of the persons of the Christian
36
Rosalind Shaw, Feminist Anthropology and the Gendering of Religious Studies, in The
Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, ed. Russell T. McCutcheon (London and New
York: Cassell, 1999), 10413.
220

Trinity in prayer. Griffith writes, Women like those in Aglow claim to
have found the true path to liberation and this-worldly fulfillment in a
committed relationship with a Jesus who is at once father figure and
lover, a relationship sustained and nurtured by communicative prayer.37
The womens prayer purportedly involves, in Griffiths words, a direct
and immediate experience of God.38 Oftentimes the experiences involve, according to the Aglow members, emotional and/or physical
healing. The womens religious experiences are at times psychological
in nature, but they may also be bodily, as in weeping, speaking in
tongues, verbally relaying messages ostensibly received from God, and
undergoing events that the charismatics term being slain in the spirit,
which consist in falling to the ground and lying motionless. Such experiences have a tremendous impact on the women. Prayer, with its
attendant experiences, is the chief and most tangible practice wherein
participants social and religious identities are constituted, Griffith
says. She explains, A persons sense that God listens to her, cares about
her sufferings, and delivers her from pain gives birth to a distinct sense
of self-awareness, the feeling of discovering a self that was lost or receiving a new self in the place of one that was dead.39 A womans
belief that she is in an intimate, personal relationship with God and
the religious experiences that she has bolster her own sense of efficacy
and significance, transform her interpretation of and orientation toward tragedies and difficulties in her life, and motivate her to actively
care for and receive care from others, importantly, other women. It is
the experiences themselves, and not merely discourse about experiences, that orient the women to their social and religious world in these
ways.
For further examples of the value of the category of experience to
religious studies, drawn again from the Pentecostal/charismatic Christian movement, we can consider various attempts to explain the explosive growth of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America. Functionalist explanations abound in the literature, emphasizing factors such as
anomie (Pentecostalism provides clear norms for people experiencing
disorientation upon moving from village to city), class (Pentecostalism
provides economic uplift for poor people or provides psychological
compensation for their poverty), gender (Pentecostalism improves the
situation of women), or modernization (Pentecostalism mirrors the
structure and functioning of the emerging, or at least sought, indus37
Griffith, Gods Daughters, 207.

Ibid., 77.
39
Ibid., 81, 108.
38
221

trialized economy-state relationship).40 In advancing these explanations, however, scholars frequently do not attend to the accounts the
practitioners themselves give for converting to Pentecostalism. Two
studies that do listen closely to the Pentecostals own voices conclude
that religious experiences are a major factor in accounting for conversions. Daniel Mguez, on the basis of his ethnographic research in
Buenos Aires, Argentina, determines that,
besides economical or familial factors, people also evaluate each religious group
in terms of the proposal it makes of who sacred beings are, how they act in
the world, how should believers relate to them and so on . . . [The converts]
were not completely satisfied with the kind of relationship with sacred beings
and forces proposed by the Catholic religious tradition to which they belonged:
they did not usually attend mass, or even had doubts of whether God existed
and could intervene in his or her life. . . . What initially attracted these (partially) incredulous individuals to the Pentecostal church was exactly that, due
to the experiences that its ritual, doctrine, and community life provided, it
helped them establish more fulfilling relationships with sacred beings and
forces.41
R. Andrew Chesnut, too, places religious experience squarely at the

center of his explanation of Pentecostal growth, this time in Brazil.
Specifically Chesnut sees experiences of faith healing as the principal
explanatory factor, and he posits that the dialectic between povertyrelated illness and faith healing provides the key to understanding the
appeal of Pentecostalism and much of Latin America.42 Were experience to drop out of the scholarly lexicon, the sorts of studies and explanations that Griffith, Mguez, and Chesnut conduct would be impossible.
To understand experientially rich religious communities like charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, and indeed, any religious community in which people report occasional or ongoing awareness of some
transcendent reality, requires a robust category of experience and a
conceptual distinction between experiences and discourse about experiences. What needs to occur is a refashioning of the concept of
40
For a gender-based explanation of conversion to Pentecostalism, see Elizabeth E. Brusco,
The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia, 1st ed. (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995). For the other types of explanation, see Andre Droogers,
Paradoxical Views on a Paradoxical Religion: Models for the Explanation of Pentecostal
Expansion in Brazil and Chile, in More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to Latin
American and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis, ed. Barbara Boudewijnse, A. F. Droogers, and Frans
Kamsteeg (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 134.
41
Daniel Mguez, Spiritual Bonfire in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an Ethnographic
Account of Pentecostal Growth in a Buenos Aires Suburb (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1998), 168.
42
R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the Pathogens of Poverty
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 6.
222

experience so that it no longer bears the baggage the rhetoric of experience associates with it. That is, we can speak of experiences without
thereby assuming that they are immediate, absolutely private, and universal. Further, we should demote the category from the place of esteem
that the rhetoricians granted it. We shouldnt treat episodes of religious
awareness as the most important feature of religious practices in general. Rather, experiences are one aspect of religious practices among
others, and experience is one category that scholars employ among
others. Experiences generally arent the most important aspect of religion, but neither are they unimportant. They are as worthy of scholarly
study as any other feature of religious traditions, and nothing about
the category renders it unfit for such study.
223
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i. new materialism and the rhetoric of experience

The Journal of Religion