Currently the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and arguably one of the most important living historians of religion in the world.

Jonathan Z. Smith (the middle initial stands for "Zittell", but just about everyone refers to him as "Jonathan Z. Smith" or "J.Z. Smith") completed a B.A. in philosophy at Haverford College in 1960 and earned a Ph.D. in the history of religions from Yale University in 1969. He began working at the University of Chicago in 1968, where he continues to teach today.

Smith is known for a number of influential theories in religious studies.

1. First, he maintains that the process of comparison has too often been undertaken in a sloppy and misleading way. According to Smith, nineteenth-century scholars like Sir James George Frazer were too quick to assume that two religious phenomena had the same origin after observing surface similarities. Their careless scholarship continues to be reproduced by well-meaning but misguided historians in our own century. For example: in his book The Golden Bough, Frazer claimed that Christianity and a number of other ancient European and Near Eastern religions shared a dying and rising god motif in which a young, strong, divine figure is killed and then rises with the grain in the spring. Frazer believed that Jesus could be understood as a later copy of figures like Attis, Osiris, Balder, Mithras, and so on, who all followed this pattern, and whose stories were all ritually enacted by the god's worshippers.

   Smith is more interested in difference than in similarity. Instead of fixating on the idea that both Jesus and Osiris were killed, Smith says, the scholar should try to understand what distinguishes them from one another. Osiris was dismembered; Jesus was not. Osiris' body was reassembled by his loving wife; Jesus had no wife at all. Osiris was killed by a jealous family member; Jesus was executed as a criminal. And so on. It is in the differences, not in the similarities, that we can truly learn something about the cultures that gave rise to these stories.

   Smith has even less patience for stories that come from cultures far removed from one another in space and/or time. Though Balder was indeed hanged on a tree, the Scandinavian people who told his story had a completely different world-view from that of the residents of first-century Palestine. One cannot do justice to either perspective if one considers them "the same" as one another.

   Historians, then, must not generalize elaborate patterns across all religions everywhere. Rather, myths and rituals should be seen as products of a particular historical moment. Smith formulates scathing critiques of scholars like Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell who insist on positing the existence of some timeless pattern that is present in all cultures. With what some may perceive as an obsessive meticulousness, Smith documents dozens of counterexamples for each of their sweeping claims.

2. Second, Smith has much to say about difference more generally. As a scholar of the ancient Mediterranean, he is very interested in the ways that Christianity, Judaism, and Greco-Roman paganism interacted. (He prefers to use the plural forms, i.e., "Christianities" and "Judaisms.") Members of each of these religions would take pride in the things that made them unlike those other guys (whoever the "other" guys may be in each case). To this end, they would formulate dichotomies such as, "What we do is religious but what they do is magic," "He is a physician but she is a witch," and so forth.

   The irony is that some of the fiercest differentiation takes place between people who would seem, to an outsider, to be rather similar to one another. To a Jewish observer, the difference between a Nicene Christian and an Arian Christian might not be at all obvious, and she may find the theological subtleties of their positions irrelevant or uninteresting even after they are explained to her. But to the insiders, these differences develop immense social importance and can escalate into polemic, ostracism, or violence. This process of "othering", boundary-drawing, and the negotiation of priorities is an extremely important focus for Smith.

3. Third, Smith has famously defined ritual as a way of paying attention. This seems counterintuitive at first: people generally want to define ritual as having qualities like being "repetitive" or "formal" or, dare I say, "religious." Theorists of ritual have found numerous problems with these definitions (if they're too narrow, they don't include actions that we know "must" be ritual; if they're too broad, they include actions, like tooth-brushing, say, that we think must not be). The way Smith chooses to get around these problems is by saying that what makes a ritual different from other sorts of behaviour is the fact that people are paying a special kind of attention to it. Ritual is to ordinary action, he says, as an italicized sentence is to a sentence in plain type.

4. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, Smith maintains that the disciplines of religious studies and anthropology have inherited a number of their hidden assumptions from Protestantism, and harbour a pervasive anti-Catholic bias. This is the case, he claims, even with scholars who may personally be Roman Catholic, Jewish, atheist, or something else entirely. The academe itself, according to Smith, is Protestant in orientation, and its own Protestantism is reproduced in the work of almost everyone trained within it.

   The argument that he makes in support of this position, which is laid out most clearly in his book Drudgery Divine, is too long and complex to explain here. In short, Smith notes that modern scholars tend to privilege philosophy and abstract thinking over rituals and material objects. The fact that many anthropologists do not take folk traditions, material culture or even ritual itself seriously suggests to Smith that scholars have fantasies of separating themselves from the messiness of this world and living in a perfect world of Platonic ideals. He believes that the excessively theological approach to religious history, which neurotically avoids discussion of historical, political, and physical realities, finds its roots in the arguments about the sacraments that took place during the Reformation. My own summary of this position probably does not sound especially persuasive, but Smith manages to trace a remarkable genealogy of ideas about religion (and, indeed, the word "religion" itself) through the scholarship of the past three hundred years.

   Smith sees the constant hunt for origins as another "Protestant" characteristic. Just as Martin Luther (and his philosophical descendents, modern fundamentalists) wanted to toss out every element of Christianity that is not in the Bible, so also modern historians of religion refuse to take postbiblical developments seriously as explanations for certain religious phenomena. Rather than assuming that the only "real" parts of a religion are the ones that were there at the outset, Smith argues, scholars need to take a more diachronic and nuanced view, paying attention to changes across time and influences between cultures.

Smith certainly has his detractors. He is occasionally accused of being anthropocentric -- his theories do not leave much room for gods, or even for awe and wonder more broadly conceived. His zeal to criticize much-beloved scholars like Joseph Campbell have made him a lot of enemies among people who are invested in seeing broad patterns across cultures (I would count Jungians, New Agers, and some Wiccans in this camp.)

That said, it is impossible to understand the directions that religious studies is taking in the twenty-first century if one does not engage his work in some way.

Reading List:

Smith is not an easy author to read. He assembles his arguments with what I can only describe as a fastidious playfulness. He will spend pages exploring case studies that seem at first glance to be irrelevant to his argument (most famously in Drudgery Divine, in which the entire first chapter is a "digression" about early American history), and then suddenly harness those case studies into the service of a devastating critique of contemporary academic discourse. His sense of humour is wry, cynical, and easy to miss if you are not paying attention.

However, once you start to get it, it is not only brilliant and illuminating but also very funny.