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Are Religious Experiences Too Private toStudy?*

Stephen S. Bush / Brown University

i. new materialism and the rhetoric of experience

When a charismatic Christian has a religious experience in which sheencounters Jesus as her husband-lover, much about this experience ispublic in nature.1 For example, her body is in a particular posture duringthe experience, and this posture is observable. Furthermore, if sheshould report the experience to anyone, her testimony, whether verbalor written, is a public matter. And even the concepts she brings withher into the experience, concepts like Jesus, God, love, and so on, arepublic in that they are shared and were acquired through social pro-cesses of language learning. But beyond all this, it seems that somethingabout the experience is private in nature, undergone by her alone,removed from the public realm. Only she really knows what the eventfelt like. Only she knows whether she really had an experience orwhether she is lying about what occurred. Some aspect of the experiencetranspires in the privacy of subjective consciousness, a seemingly invis-ible, inaccessible realm.

This private dimension of religious and mystical experiences has longposed vexing methodological issues for scholars of religion. Neverthe-less, until recently, most have taken it for granted that experiences aresomething that we can talk about and theorize. That assumption, how-ever, is increasingly facing a challenge from a new and important ap-proach 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 AmericanAcademy of Religion, and I’m grateful for the remarks of Robert Sharf and the respondent,Wayne Proudfoot, on that occasion. I also received helpful suggestions from Charles Mat-thewes, Josanda Jinnette, Michaelle Jinnette, Nancy Jinnette, two anonymous referees, andespecially Jeffrey Stout.

1 Such experiences are recounted in R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Womenand the Power of Submission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

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tices, power, bodies, and material culture displaces attention tosubjective, phenomenological consciousness. David Chidester coins thelabel “new materialism” to describe this program in a discussion of theinfluential text, Critical Terms for Religious Studies.2 In the same vein asTalal Asad’s criticism of Clifford Geertz for thinking of religion in men-talistic terms (as a matter of belief), the contributors to Critical Termstake aim at everything mental and/or subjective, including experience,but also such things as consciousness and ideas.3 This perspective is notlimited to the academic study of religion but reflects trends in the hu-manities and social sciences more broadly. As Seyla Benhabib says, “Theparadigm of language has replaced the paradigm of consciousness. This shifthas meant that the focus is no longer on the epistemic subject or onthe private contents of its consciousness but on the public, signifyingactivities of a collection of subjects.”4

Experience is not faring well in the wake of this paradigm shift.5 Forthe most part, the considerations that generate suspicion among schol-ars against religious experience remain implicit. However, in the workof scholar of Buddhism Robert H. Sharf, we find one notable attemptto lay out explicitly the sorts of concerns that could lead one to abandonsubjective experience as a topic of academic study. In his contributionto Critical Terms for Religious Studies, “Experience,” and in two relatedessays, 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 Academyof 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 hasabandoned experience for discourse about experience.” Ann Taves, Religious Experience Recon-sidered: 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 fromserious consideration of religious experience” in religious studies, such that the “role ofsubjective 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 Approachto Cognitive Science and Religious Studies,” Religion East & West 8 (2008): 7. Taves’s workprovides a valuable service to the study of experience by bringing an impressive range ofpsychological and neurological studies into the conversation. However, she does not directlyaddress the skepticism about the viability of appeals to experience and consciousness thathas come about in the wake of the linguistic turn in the humanities, remaining content justto 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 ReligiousExperience Reconsidered, but she never responds to his own arguments in favor of discourseabout experience instead of experience, and she gives the most attention not to his essayson experience, but to his treatment of ritual in Robert H. Sharf, “Ritual,” in Critical Terms forthe Study of Buddhism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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The rhetoric of experience regards religious experiences as being fourthings: absolutely private, subjective, indubitable (for the experiencer),and immediate, in the sense that the experience is independent of theexperiencer’s concepts and beliefs.6 The rhetoric of experience hasbeen of tremendous significance in the modern study and practice ofreligion, in large part because those promoting the rhetoric, includingfigures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James, Evelyn Un-derhill, D. T. Suzuki, Rudolf Otto, and Mircea Eliade, have tended tothink of experience as acultural and as the most important aspect ofreligion in general. This enables a view of religion as universal, identicalin essence across time, place, and religious tradition. So when con-fronted by our charismatic Christian woman and her experience of Je-sus, Otto and Eliade would think that what she undergoes involves somesort of universal, transcultural religious sense: for Otto, the sense of thenuminous; for Eliade, the sense of the sacred. What’s more, for Ottoat least, those who have not had an experience cannot obtain any morethan a superficial understanding of the nature of religious experiences.7

Sharf subjects the rhetoric of experience to severe criticism. In keepingwith the new materialist perspective, he directs our attention away fromthe nature of any supposed experiences and asks us to consider insteadthe ideological functions of an appeal to a universal, experiential religion.For scholars in the West, such an appeal allows them to grant legitimacyto non-Christian religions without sacrificing the truthfulness of Chris-tianity. In the Asian context, the rhetoric of experience supported twen-tieth-century Japanese imperial ambitions against China and the West byportraying Japanese culture as a unique expression of an experientialversion of Zen.8 Another role the rhetoric serves is to be a key elementof the strategy, both in Europe and Asia, to reconcile religion with mod-ern science and philosophy. This reconciliation bolsters the legitimacy

6 Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience,” Numen42, no. 3 (1995): 228–83, “The Zen of Japanese Nationalism,” in Curators of the Buddha: TheStudy of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and “Ex-perience,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1998). Sharf’s 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 nonexperientialinterpretation of enlightenment in the context of one particular Buddhist ritual, he does notmake strong claims about experience in general. (His generalizations in this essay concernritual, not experience.) To be sure, I will contest nonexperiential interpretations that aresupposed to apply to all narratives and reports of enlightenment, but I have no reason tocontest nonexperiential interpretations of any particular narrative about enlightenment, so Iwill leave aside Sharf’s “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 theDivine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1958), 7–8.

8 Sharf, “Zen of Japanese Nationalism.”


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not only of religion but also, in the West, of the academic study of re-ligion, a field perennially anxious that other disciplines question its placein the university. Further, on a more local level, particular religiousgroups oftentimes authorize themselves and deauthorize others on thegrounds that their leaders and/or members have achieved certain ex-periential states. So Sharf points to the way in which the rhetoric ofexperience advances certain religious and sociopolitical interests, and helevels critical questions against the way the rhetoric portrays experiences.In addition, he makes a valuable contribution to the study of religion inshowing how scholars have oftentimes read mystical literature as thoughthe purpose of the texts was to describe or prescribe particular religiousexperiences, whereas in fact the texts had ritual purposes. For example,Sharf tells us that premodern Buddhists placed little emphasis on theachievement of altered states of consciousness. Buddhist monks usedscriptural narratives of experiences ritually—memorizing them, recitingthem, and revering them as talismans—rather than treating them as aguide for the achievement of extraordinary mental episodes. Evidencefrom actual monastic practices suggests that the performance of liturgicalrituals, the cultivation of virtue, and the study of scripture were the pri-mary uses of the texts, not the attainment of pure experience.9

My central aim in this essay is to investigate Sharf’s criticisms of therhetoric of experience, hoping that in the engagement between thenew materialist perspective and the rhetoric of experience, we will findinsights about how we can best conduct our scholarly investigation ofreligious experience. For the sake of clarity, I will throughout this essayconsistently use the term “rhetoric of experience” to refer to a particularconception of religious experience, one that attributes to experiencesthe four qualities mentioned above: privacy, subjectivity, indubitability,and immediacy. Some might think that experience by definition involvesthose qualities, but a guiding assumption of my inquiry is that this isnot necessarily the case. So I will consistently use the term “categoryof experience” to refer to religious experiences more generically, with-out presupposing that experiences are as the rhetoric says they are:private, subjective, indubitable, and immediate. (But neither does myuse of the term “category of experience” presuppose from the outsetthat experiences are not as the rhetoric says they are.) I use the term“category of experience” to refer to experiences however one mightplausibly conceive them. Likewise, when I speak of the “study of reli-gious experience,” I will mean inquiry into the nature of religious ex-

9 Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism,” 241.


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perience however experiences are construed, whether in the mannerof the rhetoricians of experience or in some other manner. What isimportant to me with these terminological issues is to distinguish oneparticular way of conceiving experience, that of the rhetoricians ofexperience, from other possible conceptions.

I acknowledge that Sharf makes many legitimate points against therhetoric of experience, and I appreciate his points that mystical textsoften have ritualistic uses, as opposed to psychological ones, and thatexperience reports are shaped by and contribute to ideological aims.However, Sharf’s essays, and the new materialist perspective more gen-erally, exhibit tendencies that, if followed to their logical conclusion,could lead to the elimination of the category of experience from re-ligious studies. While I am not out to defend the rhetoric of experience,I do wish to defend the category and study of experience from thetendencies in new materialism that would disparage the category ofexperience. Even so, I readily admit that the new materialists’ criticismforces us to reconceptualize experience in quite different terms fromthe rhetoric of experience.

ii. sharf and experience

Sharf advances historical and ethnographic arguments against the rhet-oric of experience, but the core of his position is a philosophical chal-lenge concerning what it takes for a word to have meaning and to beable to refer. Referring, in the philosophy of language, pertains to therelationship between words or sentences, on the one hand, and objectsor states of affairs, on the other. We use words and sentences to talkabout, that is, refer to, things; so, for instance, the word “dog” refersto a member of a particular class of mammals (or the class itself ). InSharf’s estimation, for a word to be meaningful and capable of refer-ring, that to which the word refers has to be public in nature. But ifexperiences are as the rhetoric of experience takes them to be, im-mediate episodes of consciousness, then there is nothing public forterms such as “experience” to refer to. So Sharf says, “If talk of shamanicexperience, mystical experience, or what have you is to have any sortof determinate meaning, we must construe the term ‘experience’ inreferential or ostensive terms. But to do so is to objectify it, which wouldseem to undermine its most salient characteristic, namely, its immediacy.So we are posed with a dilemma: experience cannot be determinatewithout being rendered a ‘thing’; if it is a thing it cannot be indubitable;


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but if it is not a thing, then it cannot perform the hermeneutic taskthat religious scholars require of it—that 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 theconcept applies and perhaps no objective, principled way of determin-ing whether or not it does. Many, perhaps all, concepts are like this,but they still have analytical utility because despite the gray areas at theborders, there are clear cases in which the concept does apply, especiallythe paradigmatic ones, and clear cases in which it does not apply. (Wemay 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 grainsover there clearly is not.) Sharf’s claim is not that “experience” is devoidof determinate semantic content in this weaker sense, in that it is vagueat the borders. His claim is far more thorough: “The category experi-ence is, in essence, a mere placeholder that entails a substantive ifindeterminate 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 thatget us nowhere.’”11

So Sharf’s opinion on one count seems straightforward enough: Ifexperiences are as the rhetoric of experience says they are, then theterms that supposedly refer to psychological episodes cannot actuallydo so, and further, the term “experience” itself and its cognates are notsufficiently meaningful to serve as a useful concept for scholarly pur-poses. This much is clear, but on several other matters, questionsemerge as to just how to interpret his claims. For one thing, is Sharfcriticizing the category of experience in general, or is he only criticizingone particular way of conceptualizing experience? If Sharf only has therhetoric of experience in mind, then it is only that conception of ex-perience that faces the threat that its key term is meaningless. Sharftends to use the terms “rhetoric of experience” and “experience” sim-pliciter interchangeably, leaving us to wonder whether his target is ex-perience as conceived by the rhetoricians of experience or experienceunder any conception. On the one hand, if he thinks experiences couldoccur without the four characteristics that the rhetoricians of experi-ence attribute to them, then his critical remarks against experienceonly apply to the rhetoric of experience, and for other conceptuali-zations of experience, there might be no problem at all with the mean-ingfulness of experience terms. On the other hand, if he intends for

10 Sharf, “Experience,” 104.11 Ibid., 113–14.


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his criticisms to apply not just to the rhetoric of experience, but to thecategory of experience itself, then the scholarly study of experiencelooks to be in considerable trouble.

One thing that would help clear things up is a concise definition ofwhat Sharf, as opposed to the rhetoricians of experience, thinks ex-perience is. Sharf does give a definition, but it leaves the crucial ques-tions unanswered. He says that he is not concerned with the sense ofthe term as in “I have combat experience,” since “the referent of theterm would seem to lie in the social or public sphere,” but rather hisdiscussion applies to the sense of the term that means to “‘directlyperceive,’ ‘observe,’ ‘be aware of,’ or ‘be conscious of.’” He says of thissense that there is “a tendency to think of experience as a subjective‘mental event’ or ‘inner process’ that eludes public scrutiny.”12 Sharfnotes that thinking of experience as an inner process or mental eventowes much to Rene Descartes, the famous mind-matter dualist. Butwhatever tendencies there are to think of experience like this, clearlyDescartes’s account of perception and observation is not the only one.It makes perfect sense to say I observed (or perceived) a fender benderon my way to work this morning. Nothing commits the speaker of thatsort of utterance to mind-body dualism. Then there is the question ofhow we should take the term “direct” when Sharf says to experience isto “directly perceive”? Should we think that experience, by definition,occurs in private interiority and so is inescapably Cartesian? Or arethere other ways to think of perceptual experience that do not commitus to Cartesianism?

These unsettled matters leave us with two possible interpretations ofSharf’s position and, correspondingly, two proposals as to how weshould best conceive of experience. In one of them, which I shall callthe modest interpretation, Sharf is not arguing against the category ofexperience—experiences however we might conceive them—justagainst the rhetoric of experience—experiences conceived of as private,subjective, indubitable, and immediate. In the modest interpretation,Sharf holds that if we conceive of experience like the rhetoricians ofexperience, then the term “experience” does not have what it takes tobe a sufficiently meaningful term. Beyond that, however, Sharf has noreal complaints about the category of experience, so long as it is un-derstood on different terms than the rhetoric of experience, and hehas no real complaints about the study of religious experience andmysticism, if conducted under different terms than the rhetoric of ex-perience. If this is the correct way to interpret Sharf’s arguments, then

12 Ibid., 104.


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the principal problem with his essay is that he fails to consider or discussother conceptions of experience besides the rhetoric of experience,leaving the impression, even if he does not intend to, that the study ofexperience stands or falls with the rhetoric of experience. Some mightthink that the main contribution of his essay to the study of religiousexperience is somewhat limited if the essay only advances the modestthesis, since the rhetoric of experience has already been roundly crit-icized by Steven Katz, Wayne Proudfoot, and others in the late 1970sand 1980s. This is not right, though. Sharf confronts the rhetoric ofexperience from a novel point of view, challenging the rhetoric’s as-sumption that experience terms can meaningfully refer to experientialepisodes. If, as the modest interpretation holds, the category and studyof experience are viable under different assumptions than those of therhetoric of experience, then one main task facing us after Sharf’s crit-icisms is to provide a theory of religious experience that accounts forthe meaning and reference of experience terms.

Certain elements of Sharf’s essay indicate that he has something moreambitious in mind than the modest interpretation. In what I will callthe ambitious interpretation, Sharf is not just out to debunk the rhetoricof experience, he is out to debunk the category of experience itself.Sharf is arguing not merely that the rhetoric of experience entails themeaninglessness of the term “experience,” but also that the rhetoric ofexperience is the only viable way to construe experience. If this is thecase, then the category of experience stands or falls with the rhetoricof experience, and since things are not looking good for the rhetoricof experience, the category of experience finds itself on the shakiestof ground. If experience is as the rhetoric of experience says it is, thenthe term “experience” “cannot perform the hermeneutic task that re-ligious scholars require of it—that of determining meaning,” as it can-not possess “any possible discursive meaning or signification.”13

Three considerations suggest that the ambitious interpretation is theright way to understand Sharf. First, as already mentioned, Sharf doesnot give any real consideration to alternatives to the rhetoric of ex-perience but rather speaks as though the rhetoric of experience is theonly game in town. Second, if Sharf’s project is as the modest inter-pretation says it is, then his work would align closely with the construc-tivist perspective on religious experiences, yet he explicitly distanceshimself from that perspective. The constructivists, especially WayneProudfoot and Steven Katz, have produced highly influential works ar-guing that experiences are necessarily mediated by concepts. In doing

13 Ibid., 104, 114.


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so, they have swayed a great number of scholarly opinions against therhetoric of experience. Rather than aligning himself with this perspec-tive, Sharf poses a provocative challenge to the constructivists when hesays, “The constructivists seem to assume that since the historical, social,and linguistic processes that give rise to the narrative representationare identical with those that give rise to the experience, the former,which are amenable to scholarly analysis, provide a transparent windowto the latter.” Sharf rejects this as a failure to “grasp the rhetorical logicof appeals to experience.” The constructivist thinks she can talk aboutexperiences in terms other than those used by the rhetoricians of ex-perience, but Sharf rebuts: “The category experience is, in essence, amere placeholder that entails a substantive if indeterminate terminusfor the relentless deferral of meaning.”14 Elsewhere, Sharf notes thatboth constructivists and their opponents assume that “experience” andrelated terms refer to mental episodes of some sort but seems to excludehimself from the constructivist camp: “It should now be apparent thatthe question is not merely whether or not mystical experiences areconstructed, unmediated, pure, or philosophically significant. Themore fundamental question is whether we can continue to treat thetexts and reports upon which such theories are based as referring,however obliquely, to any determinate phenomenal events at all.”15

Sharf’s implied answer to this “fundamental question” is clearly “no,”and the surrounding context makes it clear that he is referring to anextraordinarily wide variety of mystical reports, from various cultures,religions, and times. The section of his essay in which he poses thequestion of whether texts and reports refer to any determinate phe-nomenal events begins with a hypothetical objection to his overarchingargument: “Those Buddhist meditators are clearly experiencing some-thing in the midst of their ascetic ordeals, even if they cannot ultimatelyagree on whether it should be called jhana, sotapatti, kensho, or what-ever.” The objector continues, widening her scope from Buddhism toother religions, “The vigorous and often exuberant language used bymystics the world over to describe their visions, trances, and states ofcosmic union must refer to something.”16 Sharf makes it clear he meansto deny the objector’s suggestion, as he responds, “This objection attestsonce again to our deep entanglement in the Cartesian paradigm.”17 Hethen states his intent to avoid “the hoary disputes” of philosophy ofmind and appeal to ethnographic evidence instead. The ethnographic

14 Ibid., 113.15 Ibid., 103, 110.16 Ibid., 107.17 Ibid., 107–8.


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evidence involves reports of alien abduction, and Sharf suggests thatthe right approach to the widespread reports of abduction is skepticism.Not just skepticism that what the abductees said happened actuallyhappened, but skepticism regarding whether anything at all, even of avery different nature than the abductees suppose, happened. “Thescholarly consensus would seem to be that the abductions simply didnot take place; there is no originary event behind the memories.”18 Thisis plausible enough, and surely many religious experience reports, his-torical and contemporary, are fabrications without basis in any eventof any nature. But Sharf’s next moves are too hasty. He notes that UFOabduction reports are similar in respects to religious-experience reportsand that therapists fulfill a similar function toward the abductees aspriests do toward laymen and laywomen. These tenuous comparisonsprovide the occasion for Sharf to engage in a broad generalization:“The question is unavoidable: Is there any reason to assume that thereports of experiences by mystics, shamans, or meditation masters areany more credible as ‘phenomenological descriptions’ than those ofthe abductees?”19 The question is rhetorical, but we can be sure thatSharf’s implied answer is “no.” The fact that he has presented the caseof UFO abductions in response to an objector who thinks religiousexperience reports “must refer to something” suggests that Sharf wantsus to believe that religious experience reports as such do not refer andhave no originary event.

We find a third mark in favor of the ambitious interpretation in thehints Sharf drops about his own constructive proposal for the properway to study religious experience. These hints are one of the places wesee Sharf’s agenda most clearly. He says, “It is a mistake to approachliterary, artistic, or ritual representations as if they referred back tosomething other than themselves, to some numinous inner realm.”20

And, “It is ill conceived to construe the object of the study of religionto be the inner experience of religious practitioners. Scholars of reli-gion are not presented with experiences that stand in need of inter-pretation but rather with texts, narratives, performances, and so forth.While these representations may at times assume the rhetorical stanceof phenomenological description, we are not obliged to accept themas such. On the contrary, we must remain alert to the ideological im-plications of such a stance.”21 Sharf cautions us not to take represen-

18 Ibid., 109.19 Ibid., 110.20 Ibid., 113.21 Ibid., 111.


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tations of experiences as referring to any cognitive or emotional epi-sodes but rather to restrict our attention to the representationsthemselves. The representation, such as an oral or literary report of anexperience, is the proper object of study for the scholar, not anythingto which the report might refer. Presumably, if we follow the lead ofSharf’s own scholarship, we are to attend especially to the ideologicalfunctions that such a report plays: the way in which it authorizes certainindividuals, religious groups, and even whole cultures and deauthorizesothers. The stricture that Sharf places on the scholar of religious ex-perience, that the legitimate objects of her inquiry are only the rep-resentations of experiences, and not any experiences themselves, is in-compatible with the modest interpretation. If Sharf’s take on thingswere as the modest interpretation says, then he could oppose the rhet-oric of experience but still countenance some other way of conceivingexperiences 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’ meaningfullyrefer to such episodes. However, this is not the option Sharf pursues,and so his remarks about how we are to study experience reports areout of joint with the modest thesis.

Despite these considerations, it is not easy to tell whether Sharf is awholehearted proponent of the ambitious thesis or whether the pas-sages that support that reading are merely tendencies in the directionof the ambitious interpretation but not a fully developed position. Toadd further complication to the matter, Sharf’s position in “BuddhistModernism” is hard to reconcile with some of the statements he makesin “Experience.” Sharf seems to say in “Experience” that religious ex-perience reports universally do not refer to any sort of episode of con-scious awareness, whereas in “Buddhist Modernism” he restricts thisclaim to one particular type of literature: “the elaborate discourse onmeditative states found in Buddhist scholastic sources.”22 In that essay,he also acknowledges that we cannot rule out the possibility that “atleast some monks in times past did in fact experience what we mightrefer to as ‘altered states of consciousness,’ ‘transformative insights,’‘mystical experiences,’ or what have you in the course of their monasticpractice.”23 In “Experience,” he presents and dispenses with the viewthat the mystic’s language “must refer to something,” counseling, “It isa mistake to approach literary, artistic, or ritual representations as if

22 Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism,” 260.23 Ibid., 259.


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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 vipassanarevival, or those training under Zen teachers in the Sanbokyodan lineage, doexperience something that they are wont to call sotapatti, jhana, or satori. I readilyconcede this point; indeed, it would be surprising if those who subjected them-selves to the rigors of a Buddhist meditation retreat, which can involve upwardsof fourteen hours of meditation a day in an excruciatingly uncomfortable cross-legged posture, sometimes in an underground cell utterly devoid of sound andlight, would not undergo some unusual and potentially transformative experi-ences.25

So in “Buddhist Modernism,” Sharf maintains a view much like my own,which strives to acknowledge both that experiences of some sort dooccur and that they and their reports can have political implications,whereas in “Experience,” he makes suggestions that indicate that wemust forego discussion of the experiences themselves and focus insteadon discourse about experience.

So I cannot confidently assign to Sharf either the modest or ambitiousinterpretation. This is not cause for concern, however, because for mypurposes, it is not important what Sharf’s settled conviction is. WhateverSharf thinks, his essay is an occasion to reflect on the past and futureof the study of experience and examine what possibilities exist and whatpitfalls we should avoid. Sharf raises powerful concerns about whetherand how language can refer to religious experiences, and we need tothink through how best to respond to the issues he raises. The con-structivist approach to religious experience has had much to say againstthe rhetoric of experience, but the constructivists have not themselvestaken on the topic that Sharf brings to the forefront: how can language,which is essentially public, meaningfully refer to private psychologicalepisodes. Whether or not Sharf endorses the ambitious thesis, thereare at least moments in his text that exhibit strong tendencies towardit, and these tendencies are present among others who gravitate towardthe new materialist perspective as well.26 My concern is to track carefullywhere these tendencies lead and, regardless of what Sharf’s settled opin-ion is, to pose the question of whether the rest of us should adopt themodest interpretation or the ambitious one. This decision matters agreat deal, especially since the ambitious interpretation is, if not en-

24 Sharf, “Experience,” 107, 113.25 Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism,” 259–60.26 See, e.g., Russell T. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 9–10; and Donald S. Lopez Jr., “Belief,”in Critical Terms for Religious Studies.


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tailed by new materialism, at least a characteristic temptation of thatapproach. If the ambitious interpretation is correct, then the categoryof experience is irredeemably Cartesian, and so the term “experience”cannot meaningfully refer to that to which it purports to refer. But thisis to render the category of experience worthless for scholarship onreligion. Scholars and people generally must have some idea of whatthey are talking about when they use a word, if they are to communicatewith one another successfully, but experience, in the ambitious inter-pretation, defies such an understanding. It seems to follow straightfor-wardly from these views that we cannot study the experiential dimensionof religion. To be sure, scholars can study reports of experience andthe social effects of such reports, but under the ambitious interpreta-tion, they have no conceptual resources to discuss the experiencesthemselves as things that could occur and have effects in the life of theexperiencer or his religious community. The implications of the am-bitious thesis for religious studies are far-reaching indeed.

iii. phenomenology and ontology

The widespread disrepute in which religious experience finds itselfamong scholars has a lot to do with the turns to language and practice,turns from consciousness as a principal methodological locus. I do notwish to downplay the importance of these turns, but in themselves theyshould not be enough to generate the level of suspicion now directedagainst the categories of religious experience and mysticism. Importantphilosophers and cultural theorists have given accounts of consciousawareness and perception that acknowledge and endorse the turns tolanguage and practice. Robert Brandom, for example, does so as ananalytic and pragmatist philosopher and Iris Marion Young does sowhile drawing from Continental philosophical traditions of phenome-nology and poststructuralism.27 Indeed, a comprehensive proposal fora viable notion of religious experience, which is more than I will attemptin 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 declineof religious experience, above and beyond the turns to language andpractice, is the reluctance of scholars of religious experience to dealwith 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: OxfordUniversity Press, 2005).


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our attention away from the question of what is actually being expe-rienced and the question of whether the purported object of the ex-perience even exists. The ontological questions, questions about whatexists, are put to the side in order to focus on the phenomenal qualitiesof the experience: what the experience feels like for the experiencer.28

Indeed, one of the most significant methodological perspectives topromote the rhetoric of experience is that of the phenomenologists ofreligion, who are explicit in their refusal to consider the ontologicalquestions. They insist that we “bracket” the question of the existentialstatus of the purported object of the experience. For example, accord-ing to Ninian Smart, the task of the phenomenologist of religion is todescribe what the religious practitioner undergoes in practicing reli-gion: such things as “what people feel, the impact of the Focus uponthem, the performative and expressive nature of the language of wor-ship and prayer.” (The “Focus” being Smart’s term for any religiousobject toward which religious rites, feelings, and beliefs are directed.)But Smart insists that the phenomenologist must bracket the existenceof the Focus: “The question of existence does not arise in this meth-odological framework.”29 So phenomenologists of religion like Smarthave a principled refusal to account for the cause of an experience indiscussing the nature of the experience. The motive in avoiding thisissue may be admirable, in that the rhetoricians do not want to passjudgment on the religious beliefs of the people they are studying. Theywant to assess, for example, the nature of a charismatic or PentecostalChristian’s experience of Jesus without broaching the subject ofwhether Jesus actually exists in the here and now. The phenomenolo-gists bracket the object of the experience, thinking they can regard asirrelevant the question of whether what the experiencers thought theywere experiencing really does exist and really was being experienced.However, the phenomenologists’ strategy leaves them susceptible to justthe sorts of criticisms that Sharf advances. By separating the questionof the nature of the experience from the cause of the experience, therhetoric of experience cannot but portray experiences as radically sub-jective. The phenomenological account—the description of what theexperience is like—gets the first and last word as to the nature of theexperience. This necessitates thinking of experiences as absolutely sub-

28 Two notable texts that helpfully emphasize the need to attend to causes and objects ofexperiences are Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press,1985); Peter Byrne, “Mysticism, Identity, and Realism: A Debate Reviewed,” International Journalfor Philosophy of Religion 16, no. 3 (1984): 237–43.

29 Ninian Smart, The Phenomenon of Religion (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973), 62, 67.


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jective and private and thus leads naturally to the sorts of worries aboutthe rhetoric of experience that Sharf airs.

In contrast, to focus on the ontology involved in the experience, inaddition to its phenomenology, means regarding the experience as anevent in a causal process and paying attention to the causal origins (andalso the effects) of religious experiences. An ordinary perceptual expe-rience can be considered in subjective terms: we can speak of the waythe color of a mug appears, the way the stroke of a hand feels, or theway a bell sounds. However, we can also speak of these occurrences asevents in a causal process that involves, for example, light emitting froma source, reflecting off the surface of the mug, striking the retinal cells,and generating neural signals to the visual cortex. The physical propertiesof the object, in combination with the properties of human physiologicaland neurophysiological systems, make the experience what it is.

The fact that we can treat ordinary perceptual experiences as causalprocesses in which the object of the experience exists and plays a crucialrole in determining the nature of the experience ensures that we havea way to refer linguistically to perceptual experiences. A visual percep-tual experience involves the causal process of reflected light stimulatingour nervous system. Our linguistic facilities are perfectly capable ofreferring to causal processes of this sort and to the events that constitutethe process, and they were even before modern science came to un-derstand 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, whereasGod and Buddhist enlightenment are not. But on second thought, thepublic accessibility of the object of the experience might not be whatmakes or breaks the meaningfulness of the experience terms. Imaginea world in which only one glass of beer had ever been or would everbe produced, only one person drank that glassful, and she did it inprivate. Would it be that she hadn’t tasted beer? Would the phrase“experienced the flavor of beer” be meaningless and incapable of re-ferring to the event in which she drank the beer? Surely not.

Religious experiences, however, pose additional problems besidestheir privacy. What singles out certain events and not others as religiousexperiences is that religious experiences are episodes or states thatpeople report (whether rightly or wrongly) as involving awareness ofsome sort of religious object, such as a god, spirit, ghost, ancestor,extraordinary state of being, or emotion. The physical items we perceiveare generally uncontroversial in their existence. This is hardly the casewhen it comes to what religious practitioners experience. The phenom-enologists of religion sought to avoid controversies about the existence


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of religious beings and states by treating them as though they wereirrelevant to the subjective, phenomenological qualities of the experi-ence.

If, however, we are going to regard a religious experience as an eventin a causal sequence of events, the question about the objects or con-ditions that bring about the experience is unavoidable. The best wayto address this challenge is to recognize four possible options for howto interpret any experience. These options are to regard the experienceas a fabrication (a report corresponding to no experience whatsoever),an illusion, a hallucination, or a veridical event. We can consider ex-amples such as those given in Marie Griffith’s ethnographic study ofcharismatic Christians, God’s Daughters. Griffith tells of one woman whoexperiences God as “liquid love” and hears God speak to her heart,saying, “Your life is a miracle of my love,” and another whose encounterwith the divine is as “extreme heat surging through” her body.30 Inregard to these sorts of reported experiences, we can appeal to any ofthe four options to specify what may have happened to the Christian:Perhaps she fabricated the report, for whatever reason, whether de-ceptively or sincerely as a result of faulty memory. Perhaps she hallu-cinated that God was speaking to her.31 Perhaps she mistook one thingfor another, an occurrence we would call an illusion. That is, maybeshe regarded a thought of her own or an aspect of her imagination asa message from God. Judging the experience to be an illusion of thisor some other sort frees the third-person interpreter to theorize aboutthe real nature of the causal process that the believer supposes to orig-inate in God. Such theories might come in any number of varieties:Feuerbachian projection theories; Freudian, Lacanian, or Irigarayanpsychoanalytic theories; Marxist deprivation theories; Durkheimian so-cial theories; contemporary neuroscientific theories; or what have you.And finally, some might, like the experiencer herself, regard the ex-perience as veridical or at least possibly so. Theologians and those whoare agnostic about God’s existence might be willing to consider as apossible option that God really did manifest to the Christian as a sen-sation of liquid love and really did convey a message to her. (In thiscase, the person who judges the experience to be veridical is committedto the existence of God, but not all judgments that an experience isveridical need involve a commitment to supernaturalism. Religious nat-uralists, who countenance religious experiences of strictly natural ori-

30 Griffith, God’s Daughters, 81, 108.31 For a non-Cartesian account of hallucination, see Mark Johnston, “The Obscure Object

of Hallucination,” Philosophical Studies 120 (2004): 118–83.


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gins, could regard an experience of purely natural origins as religiousand veridical, but not supernatural.)

In the first case, fabrication, obviously the phrase “an experience ofGod 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 doesnot indicate that it is meaningless, any more than “unicorn” or “Sher-lock Holmes” is meaningless). However, in the cases of hallucinations,illusions, and veridical events, it seems unproblematic to regard thephrase as referring to something. If the Christian underwent a hallu-cination or an illusion of some sort, an event of some nature still oc-curred. She was affected by her own physiological state and indeed,sensed that state, but mistook the object of her sensation as somethingother than her own physiological state. To experience something, I donot have to recognize accurately what it is that I am experiencing. If Ireport seeing Frank whereas I have really seen a look-alike, I have stillhad a visual experience of someone, just not who I thought it was. TheChristian’s mistake does not detract from the fact that an event oc-curred, and it does not detract from our ability to refer to the event.In the fourth possibility, the veridical event, again our conditions forwhat it takes for a term to refer meaningfully are met. Here God isaffecting the Christian, and she is reporting having sensed God. Theevent occurs and there is no reason we cannot linguistically and mean-ingfully refer to it.

Even if we cannot be sure for any given occurrence whether whathappened was a hallucination, an illusion, or a veridical event, we canstill suppose that something occurred, label it an experience, and thendiscuss the likelihood that it was one or the other of the possibilitiesand talk about the nature of the experience in each case. Of course,no one can know but the Christian herself (and if memory fails, noteven her) whether she has fabricated the report out of nothing. Nodoubt in many cases fabrication is the origin of religious experiencereports. But only if we think that hallucinations and illusions neveroccur and that supernatural objects do not exist will we think that allreligious experience reports are fabrications. Whatever one thinksabout supernatural experiences, it strains credulity to suppose that hal-lucinations and illusions do not happen.

By speaking not just of the phenomenology—what the experience islike—but also of the real and purported object of the experience, webring the experience out of the recesses of unassailable interiority andsituate it soundly within material and social practices. These practicesinclude and involve the experiencer’s body, bringing into view the bodyboth as an entity that performs postures, gestures, and speech acts and


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as an entity that is constituted by organs and nerves, a physiologicalsystem that can produce emotional states and hallucinatory episodes.These are the sorts of things to which language can and does refermeaningfully all the time.

It is worth noting that in all of this, the scholar of religious experienceis not in altogether a dissimilar situation from anthropologists and his-torians who study reports of nonreligious and nonsupernatural occur-rences that the scholar is not in a position to verify directly. Historiansand anthropologists who work with oral traditions, for example, espe-cially face this challenge. A historian who is confronted with an oralaccount of the tribal history of the Kuba (of present-day DemocraticRepublic of the Congo) and wants to determine the historical accuracyof the account has no evidence for much of what the oral accountrelays. In such a situation, the historian assumes that the oral traditionis affected by the personal interests of the individuals recounting thetradition and the social interests of the group whose tradition it is. Inthe Kuba testimony, the recounting of the places where the Kuba mi-grated is intended to establish the reliability of the person giving thetestimony, so it is likely to be historically accurate (by the lights ofacademic historiography), whereas the testimony of the martial exploitsof the tribe and its kings have a political purpose of supporting thereputation of the Kuba and deserve greater skepticism. In any case, asone distinguished historian of oral traditions puts it, “It is usually im-possible to provide absolute proof that distortion has taken place. Onecan only hazard guesses as to the probabilities, lesser or greater, of thetext being distorted. And in order to assess these probabilities it isadvisable in every case to find out what the reasons for distortion mayhave been.”32 The scholar of religious experiences, too, is hazardingguesses about probabilities as to what really happened in regard to areported religious experience, except that scholars who reject the pos-sibility of supernatural occurrences will assign a probability of zero tothe possibility that a supernatural experience report is veridical,whereas scholars with a different presupposition will countenance ahigher probability to such a report. In sum, religious experiences,though they have their own complications, pose no insurmountabletheoretical problems.

32 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (New Brunswick, NJ: AldineTransaction, 2006), 77, 80–81.


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iv. sharf’s historicist argument about the legitimacy of theconcept of religious experience

Even if our language can meaningfully refer to religious experiences,however, we still have questions about the suitability of the term “ex-perience” for cross-cultural application. This is a question Sharf takesup as well, and here again his discussion displays tendencies that in-dicate dismissiveness toward the category of experience.

A significant portion of Sharf’s essay is dedicated to tracing the his-torical origins of the concept of religious experience. What Sharf doesis show how Japanese and European intellectuals invented a particularnotion of experience in the nineteenth and early twentieth century inorder to subjectivize their religions, rendering them compatible withmodernity by downplaying the institutional, ritual, and “superstitious”elements of traditional Buddhism and Christianity. This process was ideo-logical through and through, in that the subjectivized Buddhism sup-ported the cause of Japanese imperialism and the subjectivized Chris-tianity undergirded European colonial projects by covertly installingliberal Christianity as the prototypical instance of the newly universalcategory, religion.33 This is a story that needs to be told, and Sharf makesa valuable contribution to the study of religion for telling it.

However, Sharf at times implies that the fact that the terms “expe-rience” and “mysticism” arise in particular historical contexts delegitim-izes their application to other contexts. For example, he counsels, “Itis thus incumbent upon us to reject the perennialist hypothesis insofaras it anachronistically imposes the recent and ideologically laden notionof religious experience on our interpretations of premodern phenom-ena.”34 However, the mere fact that a concept has a historically andculturally specific point of origin neither invalidates the concept norinvalidates its application to other contexts. Indeed, all our conceptshave historically and culturally specific points of origin, and yet we applymany of them to other contexts without a catch, so long as we do notimply that language users in the other contexts employ the concept inthe same manner we do. So while I agree with Sharf that the rhetoricof experience and its assumption that experiences have an identicalcross-cultural “common core” deserves criticism, I am not convincedthat the fact that the term “experience” is of “recent” origin is itself astrike against the application of the term to premodern contexts. In-

33 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism WasPreserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

34 Sharf, “Experience,” 98.


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deed, even in registering his complaint, Sharf applies a recent term toa prior historical context in identifying an era as “premodern.”

Merely demonstrating that a concept is historically specific or that ithas been subject to ideological uses is not enough to invalidate thatconcept. If one wants to dispose of a concept, one must first identifythe concept’s significant faults, whether of an ideological nature (thatis, it covertly produces effects of domination) or of a factual nature.Further, one must show that these errors are so central and intrinsicto the concept that the concept is incorrigible; any attempt to recon-figure the concept to avoid the faults would leave it useless (or changeits meaning altogether). Oftentimes this is the case, like “phlogiston”and “aether” and also for derogatory slurs. The fault they employ istheir whole raison d’etre, so they cannot survive correction. Closer tohome, we have come to be keenly aware of the damage wrought, andignoble interests served, by the employment of certain categories oncecommonplace to the anthropology of religion, such as “Oriental,” “un-civilized,” “primitive,” “savage,” and so forth. Scholars bear a seriousresponsibility to reflect carefully and critically on the categories theyuse, the biases and assumptions built into those categories, and theinterests served by particular ways of categorizing. In these cases, theconcepts are rightly repudiated. In many cases, however, a concept hasenough legitimate uses to be worth preserving even when it containserrors. If saying “X is a man” licenses the inference “X is unfit for thetasks of rearing children and keeping house” or saying “Y is a woman”licenses the inference “Y is incapable of political judgment,” as has beenand often still is the case, then this is not to say that the concepts shouldbe retired from use. We can contest the faulty inferences, and mean-while, the identification of someone as a man or woman can still licensemany other useful and correct inferences. My own judgment is thatdespite the ideological uses to which religious experience and mysticismhave been put and despite the faulty inferences the terms have licensed(“If Z is a religious experience, then experiences of the same natureas Z are present in all religions and are the most important aspect ofthe religions”), the terms are worthy of correction and survival. At thevery least, certainly no one has successfully identified the ethical orfactual faults that are so central to the concepts so as to make themincorrigible.

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 reportundergoing episodes that we can properly classify as religious experi-


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ences. In fact, in every major religious tradition, a great number ofpractitioners report that they have had episodes in which they wereaware of a god, spirit, ghost, saint, ancestor, or something else extraor-dinary. What’s more, they quite often attribute great significance tothese episodes: they seek them, long for them, avoid them, fear them,doubt and second-guess them, risk their lives on account of them, killon account of them, profess to be changed by them, labor to achievethem, profess to encounter them unexpectedly, and so on. To use oneterm, such as “experience,” to apply to all these various types of episodesof awareness in different religious traditions is not to suppose that thereis anything universal in the phenomenology of the experiences. Rather,it allows us to ask a whole set of interesting questions within a particulartradition and across different traditions. These include the questionsSharf wants to ask about the ways in which discourse about experienceauthorizes and legitimizes certain individuals and groups. But we canask a host of other pertinent questions as well: Do experiences fostergroup solidarity? Does group solidarity foster experiences? Do experi-ences shape the institutions and rituals of a religious community? Inwhat ways are they shaped by the institutions and rituals? Do similarsocial and material conditions bring about experiences in different cul-tures and religious traditions? Do experiences produce similar socialeffects in different cultures and religious traditions? Are experiencesmore common among certain social groups than others? Do experi-ences affect the status of one social group over against others? Doexperiences foster increased commitment to and participation in reli-gious practices? Do increased commitment to and participation in re-ligious practices foster experiences? Do experiences help people over-come illness or psychological distress? Do experiences bring aboutillness or psychological distress? Do experiences affect how one viewsthe gods or spirits of one’s religion? Do experiences affect how oneviews the institutions and hierarchies of one’s religion? Do experienceshave emancipatory potential for oppressed groups? Do they quell re-sistance to oppressors? Do they contribute to the growth of a religiousmovement? And so on. All of these are questions that should be ofgreat interest to scholars of religion.35

The rhetoric of experience—with its assumptions that experiencesare private and immediate—does not help us in conducting such in-quiries. It assumes that experiences are universal across cultures and

35 It would be premature to suppose from the outset that religious experiences were mereepiphenomena of other social forces, with no causality of their own. This isn’t to deny ordownplay the social precursors that elicit experiences, just to say that the presence of ex-periences can make a difference in individuals and social groups.


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so predisposes us to miss the variety of effects experiences bring about.Further, it privileges the interior subjectivity of the practitioner and sodirects our attention away from social structures such as class, gender,race, and ethnicity in which experiences occur, all the more so sincethe rhetoric of experience treats experiences as though they were un-affected by sociopolitical power.36 By privileging experience as the pre-eminent category among all those at the scholar’s disposal, the rhetoricdirects our attention away not only from the social categories just men-tioned, 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 asso-ciated with it, the phenomenology of religion, misdirect the study ofexperience, then some of the proposals we find within new materialismdo as well. Sharf’s counsel is that “it is a mistake to approach literary,artistic, or ritual representations as if they referred back to somethingother than themselves.” He is correct that we need to attend to thesocial effects produced by representations of experience. However, welose too much if we restrict ourselves to representations and reports ofexperiences as opposed to the experiences themselves. It is a mistaketo treat experiences the way the rhetoric of experience does: as abso-lutely private subjective episodes that serve as the basis for what is uni-versal and most authentic in religiosity in general. It is equally a mistake,however, to lose our capacity to study and theorize the episodes thatso many adherents report as awareness of gods, spirits, nirvana, or some-thing else.

We can return to Marie Griffith’s God’s Daughters to see a prime ex-ample of the value of scholarship that attends carefully to the experi-ences people have and that places these experiences in the context ofthe power structures inherent in the religious practitioners’ society. InGod’s Daughters, Griffith gives special treatment to the manner in whichthe doctrine that women are to submit to male authority functions inthe lives of the women. She finds that within the overall context ofsubordination, which is disempowering, the women employ a numberof strategies and tactics to elevate their own status, to care for otherwomen and receive care from them, to bolster their self-esteem, andto criticize and reform behavior of men, especially husbands. Religiousexperience is an essential element in the empowerment their religionoffers them; in particular, experiences of the persons of the Christian

36 Rosalind Shaw, “Feminist Anthropology and the Gendering of Religious Studies,” in TheInsider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion, ed. Russell T. McCutcheon (London and NewYork: Cassell, 1999), 104–13.


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Trinity in prayer. Griffith writes, “Women like those in Aglow claim tohave found the true path to liberation and this-worldly fulfillment in acommitted relationship with a Jesus who is at once father figure andlover, a relationship sustained and nurtured by communicative prayer.”37

The women’s prayer purportedly involves, in Griffith’s words, a “directand immediate experience of God.”38 Oftentimes the experiences in-volve, according to the Aglow members, emotional and/or physicalhealing. The women’s religious experiences are at times psychologicalin nature, but they may also be bodily, as in weeping, speaking intongues, verbally relaying messages ostensibly received from God, andundergoing events that the charismatics term being “slain in the spirit,”which consist in falling to the ground and lying motionless. Such ex-periences have a tremendous impact on the women. Prayer, with itsattendant experiences, is the “chief and most tangible practice whereinparticipants’ social and religious identities are constituted,” Griffithsays. She explains, “A person’s sense that God listens to her, cares abouther sufferings, and delivers her from pain gives birth to a distinct senseof self-awareness, the feeling of discovering a self that was lost or re-ceiving a new self in the place of one that was ‘dead.’”39 A woman’sbelief that she is in an intimate, personal relationship with God andthe religious experiences that she has bolster her own sense of efficacyand significance, transform her interpretation of and orientation to-ward tragedies and difficulties in her life, and motivate her to activelycare for and receive care from others, importantly, other women. It isthe experiences themselves, and not merely discourse about experi-ences, that orient the women to their social and religious world in theseways.

For further examples of the value of the category of experience toreligious studies, drawn again from the Pentecostal/charismatic Chris-tian movement, we can consider various attempts to explain the explo-sive growth of the Pentecostal movement in Latin America. Function-alist explanations abound in the literature, emphasizing factors such asanomie (Pentecostalism provides clear norms for people experiencingdisorientation upon moving from village to city), class (Pentecostalismprovides economic uplift for poor people or provides psychologicalcompensation for their poverty), gender (Pentecostalism improves thesituation of women), or modernization (Pentecostalism mirrors thestructure and functioning of the emerging, or at least sought, indus-

37 Griffith, God’s Daughters, 207.38 Ibid., 77.39 Ibid., 81, 108.


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trialized economy-state relationship).40 In advancing these explana-tions, however, scholars frequently do not attend to the accounts thepractitioners themselves give for converting to Pentecostalism. Twostudies that do listen closely to the Pentecostals’ own voices concludethat religious experiences are a major factor in accounting for conver-sions. Daniel Mıguez, on the basis of his ethnographic research inBuenos Aires, Argentina, determines that,

besides economical or familial factors, people also evaluate each religious groupin terms of the proposal it makes of who sacred beings are, how they act inthe world, how should believers relate to them and so on . . . [The converts]were not completely satisfied with the kind of relationship with sacred beingsand forces proposed by the Catholic religious tradition to which they belonged:they did not usually attend mass, or even had doubts of whether God existedand could intervene in his or her life. . . . What initially attracted these (par-tially) incredulous individuals to the Pentecostal church was exactly that, dueto the experiences that its ritual, doctrine, and community life provided, ithelped them establish more fulfilling relationships with sacred beings andforces.41

R. Andrew Chesnut, too, places religious experience squarely at thecenter of his explanation of Pentecostal growth, this time in Brazil.Specifically Chesnut sees experiences of faith healing as the principalexplanatory factor, and he “posits that the dialectic between poverty-related illness and faith healing provides the key to understanding theappeal of Pentecostalism and much of Latin America.”42 Were experi-ence to drop out of the scholarly lexicon, the sorts of studies and ex-planations that Griffith, Mıguez, and Chesnut conduct would be im-possible.

To understand experientially rich religious communities like char-ismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, and indeed, any religious com-munity in which people report occasional or ongoing awareness of sometranscendent reality, requires a robust category of experience and aconceptual distinction between experiences and discourse about ex-periences. 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 PentecostalExpansion in Brazil and Chile,” in More than Opium: An Anthropological Approach to LatinAmerican and Caribbean Pentecostal Praxis, ed. Barbara Boudewijnse, A. F. Droogers, and FransKamsteeg (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 1–34.

41 Daniel Mıguez, Spiritual Bonfire in Argentina: Confronting Current Theories with an EthnographicAccount 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.


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experience so that it no longer bears the baggage the rhetoric of ex-perience associates with it. That is, we can speak of experiences withoutthereby assuming that they are immediate, absolutely private, and uni-versal. Further, we should demote the category from the place of esteemthat the rhetoricians granted it. We shouldn’t treat episodes of religiousawareness as the most important feature of religious practices in gen-eral. Rather, experiences are one aspect of religious practices amongothers, and experience is one category that scholars employ amongothers. Experiences generally aren’t the most important aspect of re-ligion, but neither are they unimportant. They are as worthy of scholarlystudy as any other feature of religious traditions, and nothing aboutthe category renders it unfit for such study.

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