Japanese religions Much of Storm's early writing on Japanese religions built on his doctoral research. This writing particularly examined how the categories of
religion,
superstition, and
science came to be constructed in
Meiji-era Japan. For example, the paper "When Buddhism became a 'Religion'," one of Storm's most cited papers according to
Google Scholar, examined the categorization of different aspects of traditional
Japanese Buddhism as religion or superstition in the work of
Inoue Enryō. In his 2012 book
The Invention of Religion in Japan, Storm expanded this argument to examine how Japanese thinkers in the Meiji era adopted Western categories of religion, science, and superstition. Storm examined the origins of
State Shinto in this light. The book also examined the confluence of Japanese religious thought, political theory, science, and philology in movements such as the
Kokugaku. At the same time, Storm complicates Said's thesis, noting in particular that Japanese scholars adapted the concept of religion to their own ends and contributed to orientalist scholarship to position Japan as a culturally and intellectually dominant force in East Asia, including over
Korea during Japan's
colonization of the region. Other ideas developed in
The Invention of Religion in Japan have been applied more broadly in religious studies. For instance, the ideas of
hierarchical inclusion and exclusive similarity, which Storm coined to describe Japanese methods of conceiving religious difference,
Magic and disenchantment Storm's 2017 book
The Myth of Disenchantment challenged the validity of the thesis of
disenchantment in the social sciences. The book argues that social-scientific data do not support the idea of a widespread loss of belief in magic in the West. In addition to its sociological critique of the reality of disenchantment,
The Myth of Disenchantment offered new intellectual-historical interpretations of sociological theorists commonly associated with disenchantment. The book argued that many of these thinkers, including
Max Weber,
James George Frazer, and
Sigmund Freud, engaged with
mysticism and the
occult. This trinary contrasts to earlier social-scientific accounts of secularization, which tend to presuppose a binary between religion and secularism. According to Storm, the trinaristic formulation may allow for a more refined theorization of secularism, secularization, and modernity.
Brill's Method & Theory in the Study of Religion devoted an issue to further discussing and applying Storm's idea in other subfields of religious studies. Storm has also been a proponent of what he calls "Reflexive Religious Studies," inspired by the "reflexive sociology" of
Pierre Bourdieu and
Loïc Wacquant, which describes sociology itself in sociological terms. Reflexive Religious Studies addresses the way that "that academic social science produces feedback in culture in such a way that it produces greater coherence in the social sphere that it then studies." More specifically Reflexive Religious Studies "examine[s] those societies in which the category “religion" and its entangled differentiations (e.g., the distinction between religion and the secular) have begun to function as concepts" and it describes how the academic study of religion "actually reverberates in the religious field, revitalizing and even producing religions." There Storm also discussed his plans to develop a new approach to the social sciences that he terms
metamodernism. This fed into his 2021 monograph,
Metamodernism: The Future of Theory. ==Reception==