Taking religion seriously.

In the beginning, religion was the central concern of social scientists, who came to a remarkable consensus about the key elements of religion with the notable exceptions of Adam Smith,1 and to lesser extents, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch.2 Social scientists aimed to explain the persistence of irrational beliefs in the face of modernity. Eventually, the accumulation of unconvincing theories prompted scholars to adopt a new perspective, namely, to take religion seriously; among them are René Girard, Roy Rappaport, David Sloane Wilson and Rodney Stark. While this essay principally surveys Stark’s research, it does so in dialogue with the others, as a way of showing the fruitfulness and also the arduousness of interdisciplinary research, which demands constant attention to the transition of terms and concepts from one theory to another. Since the 1960s, Rodney Stark3 and his fellow researchers4 have pursued an ambitious project to produce the first deductive theory of religion5 in order to