ABSTRACT This article asks: What might happen to our understanding of religions if we approached them as social forms that were principally organized around claims about knowledge rather than around beliefs or practices. In this article, we trace a constellation of concerns across scholarship in religious studies that reveals an existing preoccupation with knowledge claims within and about religions that undergird other dimensions of religious life. Tracing scholarship in, on, and around religious studies and drawing on social epistemology and educational theory, we challenge the field to center the production and transmission of knowledge as a if not the defining characteristic of religions. Exploring the knowledge necessary for religious experience and the concerns for knowledge that religious bodies use to define themselves and their practices, we conclude that the field of religious studies would benefit from a more explicit engagement with knowledge through what we call the sociology of religious knowledge.
Kelman et al. (Thu,) studied this question.