Ways of Seeing Ecstasy in Modern Society: Experiential-Expressive and Cultural-Linguistic Views

Abstract

Religious experience is an important but understudied aspect of religion. Sociologists need a theoretical approach that appreciates the existence of and variation in the social distribution of religious experiences. Recognizing that theories are interpretive frameworks through which we view the world, and understanding that “every way of seeing is a way of not seeing,” we examine two potential “ways of seeing” religious experience in modern society and explore their ability to shed light upon recent surveys which suggest that as much as half the United States adult population has had what can be called “religious experiences.” As the dominant views in sociology largely exclude from consideration the experiential dimension of religion, we turn to perspectives that take religious experience more seriously, what Lindbeck (1984) calls the “experiential-expressive” and “cultural-linguistic” views. While the former is an advance over the dominant views, it too has liabilities. We advocate the cultural-linguistic theory as the most sophisticated way of seeing religion. As a preliminary test of this view, we examine the relationship between “ecstatic” religious experience and “conventional” religiosity, predicting that the most conventional worshipers will have ecstatic experiences most frequently. Logistic regression analysis of General Social Survey data supports this prediction.

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