Disease metaphor
Stark and Finke look at a piece of writing Trenchard in which he suggested a person's devotion was "a fever in the head, and like other fevers is spreading and infectious." Here, religious faith is metaphorically imagined as a sort of disease which spreads and renders the sufferer unable to reason properly.
Full flower metaphor
When speaking about the promotion of science during the Enlightenment era, the authors state that this movement led to an "intellectual tradition that reached full flower centuries later." This metaphor is used to describe how this line of thinking developed over time, much like a flower growing.
Economic market metaphor
Stark and Finke speak of religion as a metaphorical "economic market," whereby they have the demand of current and potential followers who are offered the "products" of religious doctrines and practisers. They state that this application of economic language is "meant neither to offend nor as mere metaphor." Instead, they argue that this comparison has the value of "immense explanatory power."
Couched in metaphor
Stark and Finke also look at the arguments of Paul Tillich, including his limitation of God as an impersonal "ground of our being." The authors suggest that the conception of modernism suggested by these kinds of arguments is "a faith of irreligion couched in metaphor and embroidered with poetry."
God as a metaphor
Stark and Finke have previously written about how professional ecclesiastics often create a distance between divinity and followers. In this text, they explain that they "intellectualize" religion in a way that "typically leads to a more distant, less responsive conception of divinity- the suggestion that God is a metaphor or pure subjectivity never comes from the pews, but from the pulpit."
