Tag Archives: capitalism

Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the private property society

27 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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‘Religion’ is part of a classification system that appears to the secular liberal as neutral, given unproblematically in consciousness as corresponding to how the world is, independent of the discursive formations that constitute our collective inter-subjective apprehensions. Yet on the contrary, classification systems embody power relations. Critical religion proposes that religion is a power category that, in dialectical interplay with other power categories such as ‘politics’, ‘science’ or ‘nature’, constructs a world and our own apprehensions according to the interests of private property, and the various beliefs, institutions and practices that have come into the world to protect private property.

The right to the outright private ownership of the earth, including the right to buy and sell for purely personal gain, unencumbered by any effects the practice might have on the lives of other people or the environment, is a historically peculiar idea, one which would have been incomprehensible to most of the peoples who ever existed. And yet this masculinist fiction of the naturally possessive individual and his supposed rights of private ownership – rights for which women had to struggle for centuries to achieve for themselves – has been transformed into our dominant notion of ‘human nature’, and has become the globalising norm of the world order.

The category religion has a unique function in the way it enables the mythical basis of private ownership of the earth, and makes it seem normal and inevitable. The right to unlimited private accumulation of our common organic inheritance, regardless of the effect on the rest, is the default position of liberal and neoliberal capitalism. In putative contrast to the blind faith of ‘believers’, private ownership of the earth is celebrated by generations of secular liberals as an enlightened discovery, a sign of a higher stage of progress and development, our collective arrival at mature knowledge of ‘reality’, including what it means to be human.

Critical religion is a revolutionary practice that seeks to subvert the rhetorical illusions that transform a peculiar way of owning the earth into common sense normality, as though there is an inherent inevitability – betrayed by such common expressions as “that’s the way the world is”, “you can’t change human nature”, or “stuff happens” – that the land, the air, the water, the energy, and even the genes of our collective organic inheritance can be privately owned and privately profited from, with minimal if any responsibility for impact on the remainder.

It follows from this position that there cannot be a genuine postmodern or postcolonial consciousness at least until the modern liberal categories of the understanding have been critically deconstructed and the illusion that they are neutral and objective has been dispelled. To be postmodern and postcolonial is to be post the categories of secular liberal understanding. We are not there yet.

To faithfully pursue this process brings one up against the inflexible resistance of the liberal or neoliberal university and its structures and priorities. This critical challenge to the dominant norms does not win one many friends. The liberal universities within which we work reflect and reproduce these ideological priorities. This is a good reason why liberal academics cannot effectively stand up against the neoliberal transformation of universities into business corporations with top-down, anti-democratic managerial structures, and an obsessive reduction of all values to market commodities.

The Undergraduate Religious Studies Major as Preparation for a PhD in the Humanities and Social Sciences

13 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, Vanderbilt University

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Undergraduate students who are sold on the Religious Studies major for their undergraduate education are often promised that they will become better writers, critical thinkers, and that they will leave university with a mastery of oral communication and presentation skills. These skills serve them well in any job or other postgraduate endeavor. But a degree in Religious Studies confers so much more than that. As Religious Studies encompasses every facet of the human experience, the scholar of religion by necessity becomes fluent in the humanities and social sciences as a whole. The interdisciplinary degree prepares students for postgraduate work in any of the humanities and social sciences in a way that enriches the student’s background and allows them the lateral thinking necessary to figure out the best approaches for their proposed project.

I did not understand this when I started my undergraduate degree in History and Religious Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, back in 2002. I quickly learned that my history courses all followed a similar format consisting largely of textual analysis, historiography, and that certain way historians are taught to think and write. My Religious Studies courses, on the other hand, were as different from one another as they were from the subject of history. These courses had very few methodologies in common. While in one class we depended on a wide variety of economic theory to analyze the role religion plays in global economies, in the next we spent the entire semester reading just a few dense texts very closely to uncover the gendered philosophies behind major world religions.

At the time I couldn’t see how this degree could help me on my quest to become a historian. Our classes read some histories, sure, and discussed historiography when we read theorists and philosophers in the order of publication, but there was so much other, well, stuff.

Instead of comparing religions, classes consisted of thorough exposure to the foundations of theoretical work in the humanities. They were hard-hitting and emphasized thematic, interdisciplinary study. Now that I am in my final year of the PhD at Vanderbilt University in the United States, I can see just how much time this other stuff has saved me. My dissertation project uses the written sources of mainly seventeenth-century European slave traders (the British, Dutch, Prussian, and Swedish), to investigate how coastal West Africans asserted influence in the mercantile culture of the Atlantic slave trade. This will uncover their role in contributing to the early modern capitalist economy. Like Religious Studies, it too is by necessity interdisciplinary.

The work I had done as an undergraduate in the Religious Studies program introduced me to the fields of inquiry I need to be familiar with in order to complete this project. For example, in a course on religion and postcolonialism, our class poured over the works of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak, which introduced me to the trajectories of the developing world, and the role Europeans played in this. Reading Karl Marx and Adam Smith in the religion and economy course introduced me to economic theory, and piqued my interest in the very fascinating debate on the connections between slavery and capitalism, at which Eric Williams is the center. Exegesis of religious texts like the Quran sharpened my skills in close readings of primary sources. This skill is essential for my project, as studying the history of Africans through European documents requires the most critical eye.

In addition to this, the language of many great philosophers of religion was German, and reading these texts in the original language (which was optional of course- my professors at Stirling were not sadists) improved my language skills and my readiness to learn further languages, such as Dutch and Swedish, for my project. Not to mention that all the theory we read (Freud, Kristeva, Foucault, just to mention a few) as part of larger writing projects in the Religious Studies department showed me how to apply theory, and how to know when to apply (and more importantly, when not to apply) it. In my honors year, writing an ethnography for my Religious Studies undergraduate dissertation conferred familiarity with the discipline-specific language of anthropologists and archaeologists, which I now make use of to get at historical issues of pre-colonial West Africa about which the Eurocentric texts are silent.

This is but one example of how the interdisciplinary nature of the Religious Studies degree at the undergraduate level readies students to branch out to challenging PhD projects in virtually any area of the humanities and social sciences. The very cutting edge of the field is increasingly concerned with matters of interdiscliplinary inquiry, and some departments are changing their name to “Religion” in recognition of this shift. The critical study of Religion, with a capital “R,” gave me the confidence to tackle a complex project that draws on multiple methodologies, and I can’t recommend this type of critical program enough to any undergraduates who wish to continue in academia.

Profits of Doom

22 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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There have always been prophets of doom. History is punctuated by exclamatory voices crying, in one form or other, that catastrophe is imminent or the end is nigh. These voices often pronounce their message in the name of some divine authority, whether the Hebrew prophets, who spoke on behalf of Yahweh, the Greek Sibyls, who spoke as ones possessed by Zeus and the gods, or the first Christian prophet, who audaciously claimed, or at the very least insinuated, he was God. Subsequent doomsayers have varied, yet most all have grounded their proclamations on some other-worldly source, even if these are of an astrological, astronomical, or occultic nature. There are limits, however: few have prophesied an alien invasion, for example, simply because the doom, to be taken with any degree of credibility and seriousness, must seem plausible within our immediate context. The signs must be ripe – as signs of our times. (How can you predict, much less give credibility to, alien times?)

So it was as I listened several months ago to one of the latest prophets of doom to emerge, and who subsequently went, as they now say, “viral”, I was struck by the utter disconnect from any divine or other-worldly authority. Today’s messengers of doom no longer need divine underwriting, because humankind has advanced to a point where, in the last century, it has become capable of destroying the entire world completely by its own devices. This is not just imminent doom; it is now, and entirely, immanent doom.

Typical to our world, the latest prophets also carry no sustaining effect. They are five-minute prophets, fame-mongers with proclamations designed for the transience of the headline, the ephemerality of the sound-bite. In this sense they are seldom real prophets by any proper definition. What also struck me in this case, however, was that, though none had heard of his name before, and few have heard of his name since, and though he was clearly and unashamedly out for his micro-minute of fame, his message was able to plunge deep below the surface of ubiquitous political, social, and economic gloom, into the subterranean depths of immanent doom.

The doom I’m speaking about issued from a BBC interview of an independent stock market trader Alessio Rastani, who, even in his own industry, was relatively unknown – http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/trader-on-bbc-sounds-alarm-about-market-crash.html. His notoriety rose dramatically when, asked for a television on-air interview, as an expert in the trading world, to comment on the state of the world markets, and the Eurozone markets in particular, he held nothing back. The markets will crash, he exclaimed, without any prelude or fanfare, because “markets right now are ruled by fear”. We’ve all heard such prognostications before, and, quite frankly, few of us would take this seriously, because we all know the markets are virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. But this claim, in a long line of many just like it, was not the source of the doom. It was rather what he admitted shortly afterwards: “personally, I’ve been dreaming of this moment for three years.” Here was the predatory trader acknowledging that market economies and market stability are not his, or any of his colleagues, concern. He just wants to make money, and if a market crash can make him money – in his eyes, a ton of money – then it cannot come soon enough.

This brought to my mind Walter Benjamin’s famous fragment “Capitalism as Religion”, in which he claims that capitalism holds a similar structure to religion, with four distinguishing characteristics: 1) it holds to no special dogma or theology; 2) it is ceaseless, with no ritualised sense of time (no Sabbath, no sacred holidays); 3) it is wholly guilt-ridden, rather than repentance based; and 4) it necessarily conceals its God.* Now much has been made of these nascent thoughts of Benjamin, and increasingly much justification has been found for them. Few today would contest the ceaseless nature of capitalist forces, or that its dogma, if it has any, is, like its God, concealed amid the worldliness of its operations. Economies are wholly human affairs, and the attainment of wealth through capitalist mechanisms, capitalist strategies, and capitalist motivations buries any religious faith and fervour well enough below the surface of its gross materialism. But occasionally a deep rumbling within – implosive bank greed, or wild market volatility that follows upon such events – shows up the tenuous nature of its belief system, and the “cultic” nature of its structure (Benjamin’s term) begins to suggest a different level of operation. And one simply needs to reflect upon the motto written on all American paper money to see that the connection is, as Benjamin had seen already in the early 1920s, more than suggestive: “In God We Trust”. (Benjamin went even further, and compared the human images on banknotes to iconography.)

But the third characteristic, Benjamin’s notion of guilt, has always been the most difficult to ascertain. Benjamin claims that the cult of capitalism engenders blame, that an “enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult”. Yet the statement remains oblique, and the author never elaborates just what this blame or guilt is for, and why it might include God himself in its comprehensive power. We are left, from the fragment, to supply our own reasoning: the guilt of profit for its own sake, perhaps, or in more Marxian terms, the guilt of alienation or of the exploitation of the labourer.

As I listened to Rastani, who was simply a momentary spokesman for the trading industry at its most voracious, the industry that brought a global fiscal meltdown through the sub-prime market, and against which a global movement has now begun to resist, I began to wonder if Benjamin had got this point about guilt correct. The revelation here was the very absence of any guilt. What left the interviewer’s mouth gaping, literally, was the vulture-like indifference to the suffering of the wounded animal. Or perhaps indifference is too kind – the rapacity. Guilt was not only missing; it was not part of this creature’s capability.

But there may be another way to read Benjamin on this point. The German word for guilt that Benjamin has used here is Schuld, which has two further related meanings: blame and debt. It is thus not simply that capitalism engenders culpability in either exploiting or being exploited; it is also that the system places us all in a position of unmitigated debt. And this is not merely financial debt, though for many, and increasingly, it may be financial. Like most religions, it involves a perpetual owing, a being on credit to the system (the gods/God), but now without ever a payment to come, or goods to be exchanged (exoneration, atonement, reconciliation, redemption). What Rastani, this current prophet of doom, betrays for us is that we lie in wait for a catastrophe that, whether it comes or not, never allows us to get outside the system that generates it. For if the market crashes, most of us are in debt for what we cannot pay. But the few who make money are also in debt, and at a more profound level – to the system that profited for them. They don’t make the money directly themselves; they are indebted to the system to enact this for them. (Money, we remember, has only ever been a token for what we have made. Commodities trading is only ever the exchange of tokens for what has been traded, money – an even further remove from reality.) We are all in debt to a system, to an economy of intangible forces, that we have no way to transcend, since what we’ve gained is itself the means for gaining it. As someone has astutely said of capitalism’s circularity, “Everything that has meaning is immediately identical with what it means”.† Our prophet in three years waiting is himself doomed, not because he may never strike it rich – enough in his industry clearly have – but because by striking it rich, he will, of necessity, be swallowed up in the despair of not being able to redeem himself, or of not being able to convert the material back into anything other than the material. Thus, as Benjamin says, all we attain is a “world of despair”.

Now the conversion of money back into material goods is precisely what any profit-seeker ultimately hopes for, since with material prosperity comes, the cult of the system tells us, peace of mind, self-direction, and the so-called good life. Yet every other religion, including even the ancient Epicureans, has taught the opposite: money does not bring happiness. This is a stock piece of wisdom. Why is it that the religion of capitalism has had such a difficult time understanding such a basic, and we might even now say, superficial teaching? Perhaps we can now answer: guilt – to abandon its God, Mammon, the concealed God of self-generating abstracted profit, or the commodification of money for its own internal sake, and not for the sake of the very self that is in despair, is to foreclose on the debt we owe it. But with such a guilt comes the very obliteration of our being, individual and collective. Such is the doom that awaits us.

That no one has yet found an alternative to this religion and its guilt, and least of all the religions of the West that have become synonymous with them – this is what is truly despairing. To their credit, the Occupy movements are trying to mount some countering force. If their momentum can be sustained, it may very well begin to disenfranchise capitalism in the form that we have come to know it. But this will not happen, I expect, unless that movement – any movement – sees and addresses the religious nature of the system, and addresses the immanent guilt and debt at its core.

 

*Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”, trans. Chad Kautzer, in The Frankfurt School on Religion, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 259-262.
† Werner Hamacher, “Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch ‘Capitalism as Religion’”, trans. Kirk Wetters, in Diacritics 32.3-4 (Fall-Winter 2002), p. 87.

Critical religion and the religion-secular binary: a response to Richard Roberts

01 Thursday Sep 2011

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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(Note that this posting refers directly to this blog entry by Richard H. Roberts, itself in part a response to an earlier posting of mine.)

Thanks to Richard for his thoughts on my work. The problem begins with his title, ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ This implies that one might find no value in any of that vast range of moral communities and their practices and that are typically classified by Euro-Americans as ‘religious’. This is a basic misunderstanding. My argument is that classifying such communities, and their practices and values, as ‘religious’ has the effect of marginalizing them from the mainstream of public debates on justice and the proper ends of the good life. Such classification has the effect of clothing secular reason with the misleading aura of neutral objectivity, as the central, fundamental and inescapable order of things, and disguising the metaphysical commitments and ideological value-judgments which underpin secular institutions.

This part of the argument does not come directly from Marx, because Marx’s vast and complex work contains ambiguities about both ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ science or politics. One aspect of Marx which I reject, but which was emphasized by Lenin in the foundation of the Soviet socialist State, was its phoney scientistic claims to objective knowledge of the laws of history and socialist economic theory. In 1905 Lenin clearly expressed a secular scientific standpoint as the basis of Revolution, and in the process reproduced a similar dichotomy between religion and secularity as that produced earlier in the 19th century by the tradition of liberal economics. A.N.C. Waterman (2008) holds that Richard Whately, in his inaugural lecture of 1831 as Drummond Professor of Economics, was the first to claim that economics is a secular science essentially different from ‘religion’. Waterman’s purpose in his historical argument is to show how the basic presumptions of liberal economic theory derived quite directly from debates in moral theology since the late 17th century. (However, I don’t assume that Waterman would necessarily wish to draw the same conclusions as Robert Nelson in his book Economics as Religion (2001), which also explores such issues).

I suggest that both socialist and liberal capitalist economics have been different stages in, and different forms of, the same processes which transformed the meaning of Religion from Christian truth to one of a large range of dubious practices that should be tolerated but marginalized. In both cases we find the mystification of secular reason and ‘progress’, and the reduction of alternative moral discourses which might challenge both state socialism and liberal (or neo-liberal) capitalism.

This positivistic tradition of interpreting Marx needs to be put next to other possible readings of Marx. One is the critical tradition of Marxism (on which I know that Richard is well-informed) which sees all knowledge as having an ideological component and function in the legitimation of a hegemonic worldview. My contribution to this important insight, pursued by Gramsci and also the Frankfurt school among others, is that the religion-secular binary is a foundational part of the naturalization of both ‘scientific’ socialism and ‘scientific’ capitalism.

Another, less critical position which I do not share is reflected in the habit of Richard’s mentor Ninian Smart and other writers to describe Marxism as a pseudo-religion or quasi-religion. By arguing that Marxism is a pseudo-religion, the assumption is introduced that it is not a ‘real’ religion. But what is a real religion?

My own argument is that, rather than searching for, or assuming the existence of, real religions as against pseudo-religions, we need to look at how the term religion has been used historically. What I believe to be the case is that, in English language at least (and I doubt if the case is much different in German, Dutch, or French) for several centuries since the Reformation the term ‘religion’ was used typically to refer to Christian truth, mainly Protestant truth, and that this dominant discourse on religion encompassed government and every other institution. In that context, ‘secular’ also had a profoundly different meaning from the one given to it much later by 19th century writers such as Whately (1831) or Charles Holyoake (1851), or, in the early 20th century by Lenin.

In the older paradigm of the meaning of religion as Christian truth, ‘pseudo-religions’ were the equivalent of paganisms, irrational substitutes for real religion (Protestantism). When writers like Samuel Purchas in the early 17th century wrote about the religions of the world, my claim is that this was an ironic or parodic use of the term, even though such parodic observations on the foolish practices of heathens did represent a stage in the later, long-term development of the so-called scientific study of ‘religions’. Thus, while an important scholar like Max Muller was claiming that religions can be studied scientifically, he was simultaneously subscribing to the view that only Protestant Christianity was a fully fledged religion, and that Hindu practices were degenerate and irrational. This deeply ideological use of the term has passed into the foundations of religious studies.

Given these ideological uses of such a contested term, it seems difficult to understand how ‘religion’ could ever appear to be a neutral category useful for objective and empathetic knowledge.  On the contrary, I hold that this duality in the historical deployment of religion, which is still powerfully evident, both elides its contentious value judgments and at the same time inscribes the conceits of the secular as the unavoidable ground of rational judgment.

In this context Richard’s title ‘Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?’ seems unclear in its meaning. It partly depends on what Richard intends to mean by religion. Is he referring to the Catholic Mass? Or the Prince-Pope Pontifex Maximus? Or the ‘religious orders’ as distinct from the secular priesthood? Or the practice of Communion by English male elites in Parliament well into the 19th century? Or the anointing of the Sovereign head of the Commonwealth, up to and including Queen Elizabeth II in 1953? Does it refer to Christian truth as distinct from Pagan superstitions, as contemporary evangelical missionaries have it? Does it refer to those practices and communities deemed in one powerfully-disseminated contemporary discourse as dangerous, irrational and with a special propensity to terrorism? Or does it refer indifferently to that vast range of practices, from witchcraft to Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika to the rituals of untouchability to ‘shamanism’, all of which are regularly classified as ‘religion’? Or does it refer to the worship of Mozart and devotion to the art of Opera? Why not classify Opera, football, or faith in ‘human progress’ as religious?

But it also depends on what readers mean by ‘religion’. Even if Richard is himself clear about what he intends to mean, there are multiple possible readings which can be taken away by other readers. We have little control over our own intended meanings once they are in the public arena. This is not to mention the problems of translation into non-European languages. One way or another, to suggest that something good or bad can be said for ‘religion’ misses the point about what is being argued.

Richard cites the late anthropologist Roy Rappaport that ritual is the basic social act. But this does not help us distinguish between a religious ritual and a nonreligious, secular one. If ritual is basic, then I would suggest it undercuts the religion-secular binary which can be seen as a historically modern, ideological imposition. I would hazard to say that the idea of a religious ritual – as distinct, for example, from Henry VIII’s discourse on ‘politick rites’-  is itself a modern invention.

Furthermore, if I go by Richard’s admittedly and inescapably brief representation of Rappaport’s work, I would ask if ‘ritual’ is being used to refer to a sui generis kind of practice, essentially different from a large range of others, such as training, holding meetings, decision-making processes, editing footnotes and bibliographies, holding elections, participating in conferences, fighting wars, ballroom dancing, or news-reading? Where does ritual end and purely instrumental action begin (if there is such a thing)?

I regret Richard’s resort to the claim that questioning ‘religion’ could lead to the closure of departments and the loss of jobs. One of the things I most respect about Richard – in addition to his outstanding scholarly work – is the way he has stood up for the democratization of the work-place against the arbitrary and dogmatic authoritarianism of the managerial class, at some cost to his own career. But the managerial class are empowered by the capitalist state, and by the mystification of markets and capital. Is he now saying that academics such as myself should cut and trim their own modest search for truth about the human condition to the templates of the HRM? This itself seems to me to be a capitulation to the regnant ideology of managerialism which he suggests I am indulging. On the contrary, my project questions the way ‘religion’ acts as a discursive cover for the presumed superior rationality of the value of self-maximizing Individuals, and of secular markets and their devoted managers. We have more chance of focusing our intellectual critique and generating a democratic debate about the purpose of universities, and the critical values which they arguably ought to embody (or could embody), by fearlessly questioning the way ‘knowledge’ is constructed. I am rather surprised that Richard doesn’t find this line of thought congenial to his own original research into shamanistic practices.

For me, in my own life, the practice of meditation is fundamental. It has much to do with truth (if I can use that word without sounding pretentious) and is often deconstructive of ‘knowledge’, or puts knowledge in a less exalted and more tentative place. Meditation (for me, at least) undercuts its typical modern ideological classification as a ‘religious’ practice as distinct from a ‘secular’ one. Nor do I have any interest in describing it as ‘scientific’, for that would merely play to the same ideological binary. By classifying such a practice as ‘religious’, its epistemological and ontological implications get de-centred and quarantined, leaving the myths of secular reason and markets unchallenged. If I claim it to be ‘scientific’, then I am still in the contentious market-place of nomenclature that depends on the same stultifying binary discourse.

The widespread practice of classifying communities as ‘religious’ ensures that they will not be taken seriously by the people John Pilger describes as ‘the new rulers of the world’. If the representations of the many diverse communities around the world are to be heard, I think we should desist from committing this act of ‘epistemic violence’ – to adopt an expression from the British Sikh scholar Arvind-Pal Mandair (2010).

Is there anything good to be said for ‘Religion’?

11 Thursday Aug 2011

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As readers of the Critical Religion blog may be aware, my trenchant colleague Tim Fitzgerald has once more launched a missile against the category of ‘religion’ in his recent posting (30 May 2011) as the word reappeared in what he regards as the wholly illusory notion of ‘the global resurgence of religion’ advanced by Scott M. Thomas in his book, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century (NY & Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2005).

Tim Fitzgerald has written a series of major books in which he has with unsparing consistency sought to deconstruct the ‘religion and secular politics binary’. Fitzgerald’s, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), his magisterial historical study Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A critical history of religion and related categories (OUP 2007) and the forthcoming Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth all bear rich witness to this ongoing preoccupation. In the opening pages of Civility and Barbarity Fitzgerald expatiates at length upon the awesome potency of Arturo di Modica’s bovine masterpiece, the Bull of Wall Street, the very embodiment of the power of capitalism. In a paean of admiration reminiscent of Marx’s hymnic response to the capacity of capitalist (and bourgeois) modernity to melt all that is solid, Fitzgerald writes:

For this Leviathan is no sacred cow dwelling in the pastures of agricultural hierarchies. Looked at from the back view,  you can see he has bronze balls the size of mystic gongs, and you wouldn’t want to be tossed, mauled or trampled in this arena.  The Beast of Capital can normally be placated through the performance of the appropriate ritual proprieties, but he will fork you on his horns if you waver in your faith (p. x)

Indeed, this reader envisages Fitzgerald as a slaughterman repeatedly striving to confront the bull, avoid its horns, plant his bolt gun on the brow of the beast, pull the trigger and fell it for good.

There are, however, problems associated with this kind of approach to ‘critical religion’ and the oppositional reification, even fetishisation of the mythopoeic and alienative capacity of capitalism.  These problems do not, for me, stem from any inadequacies in Fitzgerald’s erudite analysis, that is once a reader has accepted all the basic postulates of his standpoint. As it happens, although I share with my colleague a belief in the validity and importance of aspects of Marx’s mythologised account of capitalism as ‘the jealous god’ as it is expounded in the posthumously published Grundrisse and elsewhere in the Marxian oeuvre, I do not agree with other aspects of his analysis and the lines of argument associated with, for example, leading contributors to the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, notably the prolific writer Russell McCutcheon.

I believe that the difficulty resides in a confusion between ‘religion’ understood as a ‘category’ on the one hand and the study of the religion as a ‘field’. In principle, I remain critically loyal to the updating and renewal of the approach to the study of religion pioneered by my own esteemed first teacher, the late Ninian Smart, who had a free hand at Lancaster to develop as an interdisciplinary cluster of insights within an area of human experience and concern. This was an approach inspired by such figures as Edmund Husserl, Gerhardus Van Der Leeuw and Mircea Eliade, which was shared and then developed by, for example, Edward Conze, Michael Pye, and now Gavin Flood of Oxford. Within what the French sociologist of religion, Danièle Hervieu-Leger, has called ‘le champ religieux’, there is space for many interdisciplinary coalitions to emerge that may then harness the appropriate theories and methods with which to access and represent  the multifarious contexts in which the phenomena of human needs for community, transition and transformation occur.

Given Fitzgerald’s ongoing critique and deconstruction of categories what are we to do – and to think – if we find ourselves compelled to engage in ritual or other spiritual practices? This is, of course, on the assumption that such an aspirant practitioner might detect some vestige of human benefit in what we are not allowed to call in the most general terms in Anglo-American and European societies ‘religion’. In the interests of purging and purification where may those who like the customers exploited in Carrette and King’s ‘spiritual marketplace’ and the victims exploited in Heelas and Woodhead’s ‘spiritual revolution’ now turn?

The situation as it emerges in Fitzgerald’s critique may well remind us of that described in the early writings of Friedrich Engels, who observed that the weavers of Wuppertal ‘who do not fall prey to mysticism are ruined by drunkenness’ and presented the memorable image of the blacksmith, ‘on his right side the Bible, on his left ‑ very often at any rate ‑ a bottle of Schnapps’ captivated by the revivalist preacher Pastor Jürgens who entrances the congregation so that ‘first the young girls weep, then the old women join in with a heart‑rending soprano and the cacophony is completed  by the wailing of the enfeebled drunken pietists’.

In short, we are right back with ‘religion’ as the opiate that numbs the pain of existence and deludes the mind with structures of false consciousness and ideology.

Whilst the category of ‘religion’ may indeed be construed as a merely modern category conjoined with emergent liberalism that may then be inappropriately projected onto societies and cultures of  a perpetually estranged ‘other’, we should not fall victim once more to the contemporary analogue of the fallacies of a displaced version of the German Ideology, through which we dismiss the state and liberalism as simply the illusory and oppressive constructs of the dominant class, and seek their destruction in the secular eschatological hope of some kind of benevolent political Aufhebung.

As scholars in the field of religious studies (and I do not exclude from this the critically reflexive study of the discourses of traditions under the rubric of ‘theology’) we need both to interrogate and to investigate with empathic understanding that dimension of human life that originates in prehistoric antiquity, informs the lives of countless millions of human beings, and now manifests itself in an array of displaced and surrogate forms in the contemporary world. The world is in desperate crisis and in equally urgent need of beneficent shared symbolic universals. Religious and spiritual practices can serve as a benign source of such universals along with an array of other sources energised by what I refer to as the shamano-ritual complex.

Ironically enough, the quest for the extirpation of the category of ‘religion’ through its analytical deconstruction runs the acute risk of going way beyond critique into unmitigated destruction. Such an academic mission can further the current tendency to close down the Humanities in British higher education. The deconstruction of a category is therefore in imminent danger of becoming the destruction of a field. Such an attitude brings comfort to those in higher education deploying the techniques of human resources management who can now simply step back and watch scholars declare themselves devoid of viable categories and thus render their quiet elimination all the easier.

This situation enables the real enemies of what the Scottish historian George Elder Davie has called the ‘democratic intellect’ characteristic of the Scottish university tradition to conquer by default. The foes of an informed democracy will scarcely have to lift a finger if scholars in Religious Studies (and the Humanities at large) declare themselves and their colleagues to be relying upon nothing but figments of the class interest of the Western bourgeois imagination and the interstitial traces of a vanquished primitivism.

The events of the past week in England show that fundamental issues pertaining to the legitimation of government, social justice, and societal stability need to be addressed, or the anomie now evident in riots on the streets may engulf us all. In my view, scholars in Religious Studies should not simply remain the reluctant but paid tools of an industrialised system of defective socialisation that initiates students into informed passivity, but the source of a truly critical discourse that broadens the imagination and enhances personal agency.