One of the things which I think is missing from most of those definitions of religion which I was looking at is the importance of stories or narrative. For me, that’s probably the central and most essential part of religions, is the stories which they concern themselves with. I’m going to expand on that later, but for now, I just wanted to do a round-up of items I found on Google, by searching for the phrase: The Importance of Narrative in Religion.

This site has some interesting stuff: Narrative Psychology: Theology and Religious Studies; Moral Development. They mention a couple philosophers/theologians who believe that the human proclivity towards narrative is an essential element in approaching God. Actually, it also has a definition of religion which I think is not bad:

For others, religion serves as an overarching structure of personal or shared communal meaning by which various strands of reality, beliefs, and personal history are woven together in such a fashion that they “make sense” to persons or communities of their experiences in some transcendent fashion.

They also have a main section of their site, as well as a section giving an excellent introduction to the sub-field of Narrative Psychology.

This other article is also promising: Narrative and Religious Experience. Basically, his point is that you can’t study religious experience directly, and the best you can do is to study the narratives which are created after the fact. Of course, writing as an academic, he’s basically ignoring the possibility that you can just go and actually have religious experiences. Yeah, this article is super long and semi-boring in its language. I don’t know that I’ll be coming back to it.

And here’s a PDF article of some other academic dude talking about Religion and Narrative. This one’s better already off the bat though, because he’s trying to just cut straight to the heart of the matter, and look at how people use story-telling to make sense of their lives and religious experiences. This one I want to come back to.

Wait! Wait! Here we go! This is the stuff I’m looking for: Narrative in the Rise of Religion by Anthony Campbell. Okay, I just finished it. It’s good, but it’s not a mind-blowing as I was hoping. Anyway, here’s the best parts:

Religions, I suggest, mostly begin with narrative; belief arises later and is, in a sense, a secondary development. It is probably our Christian heritage that leads us to attach undue importance to the role of belief. Narrative depends largely on language, and there are important similarities between religions and language in the way in which they are acquired. This way of looking at religion suggests an explanation for its seeming ubiquity in human culture and also for its persistence in our modern society.

… Narrative is at the heart of probably every religion we know of. The Old Testament is not a philosophical treatise, it is mostly a huge collection of stories, and it is on these that its power largely rests. The same is true of the New Testament. The narrative of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is intrinsic to Christianity, and Jesus himself used narrative in the form of parables to convey his meaning. Islam likewise begins with the narrative of Muhammad’s reception of the Quran. Hinduism contains innumerable narratives of the deeds of the gods, and even Buddhism, probably the most “intellectual” among religions, starts with the narrative of the Buddha’s quest for enlightenment. As religions develop they accumulate stories about the lives of their saints and prophets–more narratives. New religions typically also start from a narrative: Mormonism, for example, begins with the story of Joseph Smith’s discovery of the golden tablets on which was inscribed the Book of Mormon. In almost all traditional societies the process of initiating young people into the mysteries of the tribes seems to have consisted largely in telling them stories about the deeds of tribal gods and ancestors.

The meme theory usually concentrates on beliefs, but these, I suggest, are secondary, not primary. The New Testament is not concerned with formulations of belief but tells us about things that Jesus said and did– stories, in fact. Probably few people apart from religious professionals spend much time thinking about doctrinal statements such as the Nicene Creed or the Thirty-nine Articles. Statements of belief are not how most people encounter their religion as children; they generally meet it as narrative. My own introduction to Christianity by my father began with his telling me stories from the Old Testament and I should guess that something of the kind is the experience of many people who have had a Christian upbringing.

One reason why religions have such a strong hold on human societies is that they are based not primarily on intellectual beliefs but on narratives. Story-telling accesses the human psyche not at the intellectual but at the emotional level, where it is more powerful; probably the brain pathways are different for narrative response and belief formation. Human beings are story-telling by nature. Every society seems to have had its story-tellers, its oral epic poets, and the earliest literature that has come down to us (the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Gilgamesh epic) is narrative. Today we still enjoy narratives in the form of plays, films, and novels. (The death of the novel, like the death of religion, is constantly being foretold yet both novels and religions seemingly continue to thrive.)

Anyway, there’s a lot more, with stuff about memes and whatnot. But that’s the best of it, and it’s also one of the closest descriptions I’ve found thus far to the kinds of ideas I myself have about religions and stories and how they operate together.