Paper short abstract:

The paper will lay out a theoretical approach to religion which foregrounds religion as an embodied phenomenon. Spurred by the epistemology of the material turn, the author will suggest a reconceptualised focus on the religious bodies, resulting in a theory of religious body regimes.

Paper long abstract:

Religious studies and social scientific approaches to religion have in recent years taken a particular paradigmatic shift towards a study of material religion. This so-called material turn promises to refocus non-confessional research of religions towards their material aspects - religious spaces, objects, and bodies, for example. While such a shift should be welcomed in itself, this paper will argue that the particular case of the religious body promises to bring about a more fundamental epistemological break in the conceptualisation of religion, resulting in new theoretical and empirical possibilities. The advent of embodied religion spurred by the advances in the cognitive sciences and psychology of religion, has become one of the key conceptual novelties since the material turn. Embodied religion enables us to move beyond the mind-body dualism, traditionally manifested within religious studies as the so-called protestant bias, which gave rise to the reduction of religion to mere beliefs. This paper will argue that while such a conceptualisation relegated the religious matter, and in particular the body, to the secondary role of mere expression of prior beliefs, contemporary research on embodied religion enables us to think of the body as the constitutive subject of religions as social phenomena. Thus, the convergence of multidisciplinary approaches to the embodied religion enables sociology (and other approaches of religion) to establish a particular epistemological break in empirical research itself. Based on the example of Charismatic Christianity, both as an object of fieldwork in Slovenia and as a global phenomenon, the paper will outline a potential approach to religious bodies based on the idea that the body can both express and determine religious beliefs. This can be achieved under the rubric of religious body regimes; a conceptual construction by which researchers can see religious beliefs and bodies as equally constitutive subjects of contemporary religions.