Joseph Scimecca, PhD, is a professor of sociology at George Mason University. In the past he has served as Chair of the department as well as Director of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. His research interests are in humanist sociological theory, the sociology of higher education, and the intersection of social science and religion. Dr. Scimecca often incorporates Becker into his work. He is the author of “Evil as the Social Problem: The Social Theory of Ernest Becker,” and “Cultural Hero Systems and Religious Beliefs: The Ideal-Real Social Science of Ernest Becker.”

Please tell us a little bit about you, your current work, and how you first discovered Becker’s work?

I am a professor of sociology at George Mason University. I got interested in Becker through Beyond Alienation. Then I picked up The Denial of Death, The Structure of Evil, and then I got into The Birth and Death of Meaning, which probably influenced me the most. I am religious, but you’re taught your whole career to keep personal beliefs out of your work. And that’s one of the reasons I had been originally taken by Becker’s idea of what he calls an “ideal-real” social science: he says that you don’t and shouldn’t keep your beliefs separate. I wrote a book that came out in 2019, called Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise, and the preface was the first time that I ever came out in print and said this where I’m starting from.

Some people get the idea that Becker is anti-religion. Do you view his work as being compatible with religion?

I am surprised by that, because if you read The Birth and Death of Meaning, for instance, he talks about these four levels of meaning for an individual, and the highest level is the sacred. And he states that his ideal-real science is a mythical-religious perspective that looks for full liberation. One of the last things he had written before he died was that he didn’t know what to expect, but that he believed in some sort of supernatural. From a theory perspective, the immortality striving principle is a little different than the denial of death. And I think people concentrate more on the denial of death. But the biggest influence on Becker was probably Otto Rank, and if you look at what Rank talked about it was really a religious psychoanalysis.

Can you briefly describe your sociological approach which you call a humanist sociology?

It’s an approach that rejects value freedom and value neutrality. We state upfront what our values are. And the reader then decides whether they want to accept what you’re saying. In my book Society and Freedom: An Introduction to Human Sociology, I defined sociology as an analysis of all the things that keep people from developing to their fullest humanity. And that’s what sociology should be. And there’s a lot of Becker in that. Becker calls it an ideal-real social science and I call it a humanist sociology.

What are [society’s] real possibilities within the web of fictions, in which it is suspended in any given historical period, the task of the social sciences is to see broader and better than the members of a given society, what is killing that society from within its own institutions?
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning

Why is the question of religion so often neglected within the social sciences?

I’m partially a hypocrite because I had neglected it. But I think it has been neglected because sociology is really a secular discipline. Becker talks about this too, that the emphasis is so much on the scientific, and in order to be legitimate in the social sciences you have to be you scientific in the way science is defined. So that’s why the book I’m working on now is called The Not so Outrageous Idea of a Christian Sociology. It’s not something you can prove scientifically, but one of the points I am making is that, I think often social science can’t understand what’s going on because there is no unbiased starting point. People who are Marxists or who are feminists for example, they start from a certain value system, so why can’t religion be one of those starting point value systems as well? There is a saying that there are only two themes in history of the world: belief and unbelief. I think that there really is something to the human being, something within us that that defines us rather than simply being just a product of our experiences.

What do you mean that there should be a moral imperative in sociology?

It’s about how we understand the society with a purpose. So what is it? Let’s go back to go back to Becker. As we were talking about, Becker’s ideal-real social science is not just simply an analysis, it’s for liberation. He says his ideal social science would combine psychology with the mythical-religious perspective, to provide a model for the fullest liberation of the person. And that’s what social science should be – reason should lead to freedom. There should be a moral imperative, it can be anything, for example, that you shouldn’t dominate people, But I look at it from my own perspective, the humanist perspective, which is to let people develop to their fullest potential. You can’t always look at everything in a purely scientific way. 

And, of course, no scientist is completely objective, either. But you need to have some type of moral basis. I disagree with the whole argument that if you are not objective, you are biased, and it taints your positions. I disagree because we still have a method of analysis, what we call the sociological method, which is really the scientific method – you have a hypothesis, you test the hypothesis. But I believe it’s important to have a moral imperative. And I think it’s possible. The history of sociology came as a combination of moral philosophy and empiricism. And we’ve lost the emphasis on the moral philosophy. In the case of a Christian sociology, if a Christian sociology does not support what’s going on, in terms of the evidence, then you throw it out. But the point is that you can still be scientific without being completely objective. You’re not detached, and you state your position.

I think often social science can’t understand what’s going on because there is no unbiased starting point.

Do you agree with Becker that the ultimate way to find meaning and be psychologically secure is through something cosmic?

Yes, definitely. I think that the most important thing is that people are meaning-seeking creatures. That’s what it comes down to. Some people interpret Becker as saying that it’s about accepting that everything is arbitrary and creating your own system of meaning. But it seems to me that he was talking about more than that. He wasn’t looking at it as stoicism and to simply put up with things. He felt that there was something deeper to finding meaning.

Do you think that there is a nonreligious way to achieve the same sort of cosmic relationship for those who don’t believe in a higher power?

Well, if you ask me personally, I would say, I don’t think so. But it’s a difficult thing to say what counts as a religious experience. It’s something that that we sociologists have struggled with for a long time. But now we’re moving back to the notion of the importance of the sacred. I would definitely be in favor of more people having some version of a sacred experience. But on a personal level, I would rather have the religious experience.