by Dr. Michael Smith

Created on: May 08, 2009

Jonathan Z. Smith is considered one of the best known theorists of religion. He made significant contributions to the study of religion as an academic field by developing and elucidating many concepts first proposed by Eliade, and clarifying how primitive religions dealt with the sacred and profane as categories of classification. Understanding his works will add much to the pursuit of religion as an academic endeavor.

In his book, Imaging Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Smith begins, in the introduction, with what appears at first to be a disconcerting idea. He asserts that while mankind has the archaeological and textual evidence of deities and interactions with them for centuries, the concept of religion, at least for western man, is only a few centuries old CITATION Jon82 \l 1033 (Smith 1982). What he means by this idea is integral to all of his other ideas and writings.

We are well aware that an immense amount of data exists which can be classified as religious, but Smith declares that religion as a construct is entirely manmade and is the pervue of religious scholarship. While he does not discuss why this paradigm needed to be constructed as an academic framework of the academy, it might well be necessitated by the harsh assessment of religion arising out of the Enlightenment, and more particularly the French version of Voltaire and Diderot. These leading thinkers advocated the overthrow of religion in such a dramatic way as to affect religious thinking to the present day. In order for religion to be an acceptable subject of intellectual inquiry within the academy, a paradigm was necessary in which scientific inquiry could be made. It is within this conceptualization that his statement about religion being a modern idea is to be understood.

Another idea primary to Smith's thoughts about religion is that of choice. The ability to compare between societies that are very different from each other is a huge problem. Smith maintains that scholarship is always an act of selection, choice, and focus rather than an attempt to find some kind of timeless means in some symbol or text. This act of choosing is a key element in understanding the basics of any religious ideas, and is a skill, primary to the religious historian. With such a wide array of possible data to choose from, skillful selection will lead to great understanding of the subject under consideration. Smith proposes three conditions for choosing a particular piece of data for an example.

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