The Thing about Religion

In The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions, David Morgan seeks to answer the question of why scholars should study religion from a material perspective. The aptly chosen title of his book aligns this question with a clear double word play: the book deals not only with the “thingness” of religion but is also about “religion” and the ways in which we, as religious studies scholars, define and work with it.

Morgan’s background in religious studies and art history clearly comes to the fore in the book. Since the mid-1990s he has been interested in Protestant, and later other religious, visual culture. In this book, Morgan’s focus is on things as parts of networks (or assemblages), as focal objects (powerful nodes within these networks), and as agential (acting as nodes upon the world). The things described are not self-enclosed and enduring but always on the move. As such, he proposes that spirituality and matter are not opposites; the spiritual does not mean the nonphysical, and the physical does not mean the non-spiritual. In other words, a focus on the materiality shows how the cognitive and the material go hand in hand.

In the introduction to the book, Morgan shows how the material study of religion is the study of agency: how things act upon one another, and on humans. Hence, objects are not passive subjects. Agency is projected but is simultaneously more than that: it is also inherent in things. To understand the agency of things, Morgan proposes seeing them as “assemblages” in specific ecologies. Things act not alone, but together with and in their circumstances.

Next, Morgan delves into the background of the material study of religion in the first part of the book, entitled “Theories and Definitions.” Here, in three chapters, the author slowly works towards an understanding of the materiality of religion, explaining why religious studies has tended to dematerialize religion (Morgan goes into a lengthy discussion of iconoclasm, Protestant understandings of religion, Actor Network Theory, and the agency of objects); what can be gained by studying religion in material senses (including discussions on religion, magic, enchantment, belief, and embodiment); and the ways in which religions happen materially, focusing on seven specific instances (treating the body, ingesting substances, punishment as social control, the power of faces, images as ideological devices, forms of sacred exchange, and practices of divination).

In the second part of the book, “Studying Material Religion,” Morgan describes different “types” of materialities (namely, wands as power objects, the Notre-Dame de Paris, and objects gathered from the global South and displayed in museums and institutions in the North) to indicate how objects change over time. This concentration on  “time” (both temporally and historically) is also important in the overall study of religion. The subdivision of the book into two parts at first feels quite conventional, but works well, as it traces the study of thingness from the more theoretical to the more practical and illustrative. Throughout both sections, it becomes clear that even defining what is “material” is difficult, subjective and hence open to discussion.

One important aspect of the volume to note is that Morgan does not propose only focusing on the materiality of religion. Neither does he argue that the materiality of religion is more essential than the study of religion as a nonmaterial belief system. Instead, he wants to emphasise how we might get to a different understanding of religion if we take the material, embodied, and affective into account.

The only small critique that can be made about the book is that at times, Morgan’s own Christian standpoints and knowledge too strongly come through, for example in his explanation of how “religion” has been viewed in the past. The book would be well paired with a future counterpart written from a non-Western context, in which similar ideas on the “thingness” of religion are explored and theorized. 

All in all, The Thing About Religion is a wonderful book that clearly explains the relevance of studying religion not only as a belief system, but also as a system of things, performances, rituals, and much more. As such, this volume is an important resource to any student in (material) religious studies. The book is richly illustrated, both with pictures and examples, and includes additional information for classroom use and a bibliography to support student research. Continually switching between personal experience and academic knowledge, the book reads almost like a lecture or seminar series.

Mariske Westendorp is an assistant professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University (Netherlands).

Mariske Westendorp

Date Of Review:

April 25, 2023