Tag Archives: Critical Religion

The breadth of Critical Religion

09 Friday Nov 2012

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We have asked Timothy Fitzgerald to write a short piece reflecting on why we want to broaden the Critical Religion work that we are doing, and so he seeks here to examine the wider significance of Critical Religion.

The relevance of Critical Religion

The first issue to mention is relevance: that ‘critical religion’ is not only concerned with ‘religion’ as a category, or with religious studies as a discipline. We are equally concerned with other leading categories such as ‘politics’, ‘economics’, ‘political economy’, and the ‘nonreligious secular’. In fact one element of our position is that these apparently separate categories are really parts of a system of representations which have no meaning in themselves, but rely on an under-lying binary construction with the religion-secular dichotomy as its constitutional expression. What we have developed is a theory, a method and an attitude towards the critical deconstruction of modern categories. We therefore claim relevance for interdisciplinary work throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is because we are questioning the ideological components in the disciplinary structures of the academy as a whole, and the ways these act for the maintenance of liberal mythology more widely.

When someone says or writes that they are studying ‘politics’, for example, we have our own line of questions about what this could mean. The questions are rather similar to the ones we would ask if someone claimed to be studying ‘religion’ (or economics). This approach converges well with – but goes constructively further than – much critical and postcolonial theory. Yet it makes unwelcome reading (judging by some of the reactions which have been encountered) for those who are deeply invested already in the established disciplinary structures, and feel that their careers might be damaged if they question the basic assumptions which their discipline works with.

We have sympathy with academics in that position, but the logic of argument raises problems with the arbitrariness of many over-lapping domains. It suggests that the divisions which keep academics corralled in separate departments, journals, conferences, and professional organizations share at least one rarely acknowledged purpose, which is to stop us noticing each other’s work. Specialization, say between ‘religion’, ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, reifies segments as though each had an independent reality of its own, related by only by externalities, rather than by an organic encompassment of all analytical parts in the whole. We are thus encouraged to proceed in a way reminiscent of the Indian fable of the blind persons each holding one part of an elephant. The one holding the trunk or the tail or the hoof or the ear will imagine the whole in terms of that part. This presumably (and to stretch the metaphor) is what is meant by ‘the elephant in the room’, when all one has is the trunk or the tail or the ear or some other part of the joined-up anatomy of the organic whole in one’s hands.

A term like politics is sufficiently ubiquitous to appear as an intuitive reality of everyday life. Through the eyes of politics specialists, just about everything will seem political. To me the category looks like an ideological place-holder for whatever the dominant interests require from its deployment. By looking at the historical processes whereby the modern categories religion and politics were invented through mutual exclusion since the late 17th century, we can see how an illusion of positive knowledge arises. The emergence of political economy as a secular science complicates but adds additional force to our account.

We would therefore welcome contributions from colleagues in politics, or economics, or any other discipline such as International Relations to explore this. We are not looking for some kind of illusory feel-good victory, but for dialectical innovation through shared work with any colleague in any discipline who understands (but does not necessarily agree with) our paradigm.

Self-regulating markets, the All-Male Holy Trinity, and other Divinities

One feature of our own standpoint is that markets are the mystified objects of a faith-system not essentially different from what are typically classified as ‘religious’ beliefs. We agree with the position of activists in the global pressure group On the Commons, that the emergence of the myth of political economy as the ‘really real’ is a grave and present danger to global survival. The concept of self-regulating markets may be as incomprehensible to us as the Holy Trinity appears to have been to Isaac Newton and John Locke – both apparently anti-Trinitarians – even though to believers in both cases such doctrinal formulations have been inherited or adopted as the real truth. The theology of liberation through the self-regulating market – a theology represented (without a trace of irony) as the science of economics – requires for its self-realisation the methodical (or unmethodical) destruction of what Karl Polanyi referred to as the ‘social substance’. Polanyi published his book The Great Transformation in 1944, the same year as another important book, The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek, which had such an influence on Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the IMF and so on. Neo-liberal readings of this and other works published by the Austrian school (see, for example the excellent Ludwig von Mises webpage) can be connected historically and theoretically to Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, whose activities have been described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine.

These books represent two powerful but very different readings of the historical emergence of liberal economic ideology. The central difference being that Hayek (unlike Polanyi) thinks markets are spontaneously emergent forces of nature which were ‘discovered’ by Richard Cantillon or Adam Smith sometime in the early 18th or even late 17th century. Polanyi instead narrates the often violent processes (very close to what Marxists mean by primitive accumulation) whereby powerful people passed laws which created artificial markets through dispossession of the means of subsistence. These processes continue today on a vast scale – some readers may have visited a country like India and witnessed its truly shocking disparities of wealth, and the huge social dislocations which have been occurring there as a result of the globalising mischief of market dogma and the ideological illusions that self-maximisers and self-regulating markets are the natural, rational, unavoidable and unstoppable conditions for progress and liberty. A central aim of this webpage is to identify and interrogate the globalising discursive mechanism behind the production of this naturalized orthodoxy.

The new Critical Religion Association site

09 Friday Nov 2012

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This is a new site, with many pages imported from a site hosted by the University of Stirling.  That site still exists, and is now exclusively about the Critical Religion Research Group (CRRG) based at Stirling.  So why this new site?

We have been pleasantly surprised, overwhelmed even, by the success of the CRRG site, which has attracted many thousands of visitors (the university even had to give us reserved server-space to accommodate the numbers!).  The blog that we produced on the CRRG site was the primary attraction in this regard, and our readership has grown consistently and sometimes in unexpected ways since we started that site with a posting on 31.1.11 by Andrew Hass, asking the ever pertinent question, What is a University for?  On the back of that and a subsequent posting on a related theme, he was interviewed for a BBC programme broadcast earlier this year.  This is but one example of the numerous ways in which our site has reached people in many different settings.

This extensive readership has emerged in part through our good connection to Ekklesia, Britain’s leading think-tank on religion, and we are very grateful to them.  In particular, we want to record our thanks to Simon Barrow, one of the co-directors, for continual support, encouragement, and reposting of blog entries.  Whilst we have generated many thousands of hits on our website, Ekklesia’s reposting of our blogs has ensured a readership well into six figures.  Ekklesia has also been involved in a public lecture we organised in London, held by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg (as an aside, we are very glad that she is joining this new project).  We are delighted that Ekklesia are happy to continue their engagement with the new CRA, and we look forward to ongoing collaboration with them.

As the CRRG site became more well-known, we also began to receive requests from other scholars seeking to be involved.  We – the Stirling staff running the CRRG site – discussed this at length this summer, and decided that the best way for the site to include scholars working in Critical Religion elsewhere would be to create an entirely new website.  This would not be based so explicitly at Stirling, though its roots would be there.  Instead, the new website would enable scholars from around the world to become more easily involved, make connections, and foster intellectual exchange.  This, the Critical Religion Association website, is the result of that decision.

All the blog postings from the old site are being imported here (at the time of writing, a small number still need to be republished, but that will happen very soon).  Our first new blog posting is by Stirling’s Timothy Fitzgerald, and addresses the issue of the breadth of Critical Religion.  The following week, we will be posting a fascinating piece on Lebanon by Alex Henley, a PhD student at the University of Manchester, currently based at Harvard University’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.  We see these two blog postings as an important symbol of the new site: Critical Religion is not only a way of approaching topics that long-established scholars are picking up on, but it is also something that some of the most promising emerging scholars in critical thought are engaging with, and indeed, perhaps some of the most exciting ways of thinking about Critical Religion are to be found with newer scholars.

It is our hope that the new site will enable this kind of range of scholarship to reach a much broader audience.  Whilst staff based at Stirling will continue to write blog entries, we will be featuring contributions from many other scholars based in other institutions and countries around the world.  We expect the Scholars page – today dominated by those at Stirling involved in this project – to gradually grow and include many other people, all of whom will be writing for the blog.  Critical Religion, as Tim Fitzgerald says in his blog posting today, is not just about ‘religion’, but about interrogating many other assumptions about modes of thought, and in that context, we look forward to wide-ranging discussions and engagement.  On this note: we welcome enquiries from scholars seeking to join us: please take a moment to look at the Organisation page for details.  We also intend the engagement with these topics to happen in new ways as well (for example, we are now on Facebook), and details of further plans we have will be forthcoming (these include development of audio and video content, more formal publications, and much more).  We also welcome suggestions for additional things we might pursue.

We want to thank you, our readers, for stimulating our thinking in these areas for nearly two years now.  As the new site has been worked on over recent months, blog postings have become infrequent, but we look forward to picking up on that again now.  This is a new and exciting stage in our exploration of Critical Religion and we are grateful that you are with us, engaging with our work, challenging established thinking, and enriching everyone’s understanding.

Tim Fitzgerald, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, Michael Marten

On a practical note:

Whilst we have tried to update the links on all the main pages, the blog postings will take time to update. Please tell us as soon as you can about any broken links.  In general, if a link in a blog posting is to another page/blog entry on this site, you can edit the link by replacing http://www.criticalreligion.stir.ac.uk with criticalreligion.org – in many cases this should work.

Disorganised Religion? We need more of it!

27 Monday Aug 2012

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I was recently invited to be part of a public conversation at Edinburgh’s Festival of Spirituality and Peace on the theme ‘Disorganised Religion’.  I was asked to offer comment on how I see understandings of ‘religion’ changing and to reflect on whether ‘disorganised religion’ is a helpful term to reflect on questions of religion.  The conversation was chaired by Ekklesia’s Simon Barrow, and Ian Milligan from Exploring Anabaptism in Scotland and the Bert community in Glasgow was the other discussant.  The event was sponsored by Ekklesia and the Iona Community.  This blog entry is a lightly-edited and slightly expanded version of my opening remarks, reflecting also some of the comments from the 60+ audience who came to the conversation; warm thanks to them for their insights.

If we’re thinking about ‘disorganised religion’, it presumes we know what we mean by ‘organised religion’, so I want to explore that a little bit before moving onto thinking about what ‘disorganised religion’ might be.

There is a long tradition in the West, at the latest from the 17th century onwards, of thinking of religion as being something distinct from other areas of life.  In the English-speaking world, this largely derives from Protestant thinking in the colonial context: Europeans went overseas and saw people engaging in what they thought were similar practices to ones they knew – so, for example, killing an animal in some apparently ritual form was seen as similar to an animal sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, or kneeling and being still was seen as a form of prayer as described in the New Testament.  These things may not have been recognisably Christian because these people – in South America, Africa, or wherever – had obviously not heard of Jesus and the Christian God, but the Westerners understood these practices to be ‘religious behaviour’, even though that may have been a meaningless concept to the local people.  Nonetheless, these actions were being compared to and measured against what the Europeans already knew, and more than that, they were made to be like things the Europeans already knew (Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar, famously called this ‘Orientalism’).

From that, we have the beginnings of the so-called separation of church and state: actions and thinking seen as ‘religious’ was to be kept distinct from everything else, and ‘everything else’ was called ‘the secular’ – of course, these terms depend upon each other and if examined closely, have no consistent meaning.  It was but a short step to institutionalisation of this religious-secular distinction – through constitutions, for example – and ‘the religious’ became ever further removed from ‘the secular’, and correspondingly, the organisation of religion was seen as something that was distinct from the concerns of wider society.

So here we have one example of the ways in which thinking about ‘religion’ has changed.  On a related front, this event is being sponsored by the Iona Community, of which I am a long-standing Member, and from its early days, the Community has sought to overcome the distinction that I’ve just elaborated on.  It wanted to find ways to connect the church – by which it initially meant the Church of Scotland – to wider society, to overcome the distinction that I’ve just mentioned.  In the language of the Community, this was about connecting what people do in church on a Sunday and what they do at work on a Monday; today the Community tends to talk more about the connection between work and worship, between prayer and politics, between sacred and secular.  Of course, when the Iona Community was founded in 1938, there was a presumption that most people who describe themselves as Christian would be members of churches, but that is clearly no longer the case.  So the Community has in recent years been seeking to identify news ways of engaging, and that is where terms like ‘disorganised religion’ perhaps help us think about some of these issues.

From different backgrounds then – the Critical Religion analysis of the origins and consequences of much of our thinking about the artificiality of distinctions between ‘secular’ and ‘religion’, and the Iona Community’s attempts to find practical and honest ways of overcoming these distinctions – we can point to very exciting ways of thinking of the future of what ‘religion’ might be.  Disorganised, certainly, if that means a move away from a distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ that distorts and hinders the integration of all aspects of our lives.

Of course, such attempts to move away from these distinctions have long existed – and the Anabaptist tradition that Ian is connected to is a perfect example of this – even if the larger churches that aligned themselves to a greater or lesser extent with the ruling powers have found it much harder to move away from the religious-secular distinction.  The Iona Community is another expression of this, and as it has grown, members from other Christian traditions have joined, and they have often been less fixated on institutionalised forms of religion.  Anti-institutional and non-hierarchical traditions in particular have enriched the approach the Community has taken on a number of issues: an example of this is the leading of worship, which has long been a task that non-ordained people have undertaken.

In a wider context: our world is globalising in new ways – the colonial traditions that resulted in religious-secular distinctions are gradually giving way to new kinds of seeing the global.  Globalised economics still privilege the rich, and especially the rich West, but forms of interaction are changing: in a Western Christian context, for example, we can observe the introduction of fresh ways of being church that clearly derive from the Global South, whether this be music and liturgy or sometimes even forms of decision-making and governance; the Iona Community’s John L. Bell has been instrumental in doing some of this for English-speaking communities.  Much of this kind of change relates to people seeking to engage more fully in worship and live their lives in a way that is more consonant with their understanding of priorities.  Emerging church movements and radical alternatives to church are all key to this process, as for some people that can happen in traditionally organised institutions, for others it needs to happen outwith them.

Either way, there is no doubt that ‘disorganised religion’ – in the sense of overcoming the religious-secular divide – is a useful way of thinking about what it is that many people are seeking to do.  Because they almost always perpetuate the religious-secular divide, ‘religious institutions’ are in fact perpetuating their own marginalisation.  This in turn encourages strong reactions from many so-called secularists when such institutions are seen as failing ‘to keep to religious matters’.  We can observe this in the same-sex marriage debate currently taking place in Scotland: there is a clear majority of the population in favour of the government’s moves towards equality, but many institutional religious figures oppose these moves, often arguing (incorrectly) that they will be discriminated against if same-sex marriage is legalised.  This failure to recognise that the granting of privileges that the majority have to everyone is not discrimination but equality, simply furthers the marginalisation of these institutions in wider society and deepens the religious-secular divide.

So if disorganised religion is about subverting the very idea that a religious-secular divide exists, then we need much more of it!  We often hear people say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’.  What is often meant is that people want to do justice to a desire or a need for some kind of spiritual or transcendental experience but they want nothing to do with the institutions that have grown up around what is seen as ‘religion’.  Perhaps such people are finding ways of overcoming the divide between ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ and discovering new ways of being whole human beings.  Certainly, for those on the margins seeking to live out an integrated ‘disorganised’ life, there may be mistakes made and wrong turns taken – but that element of the human condition is also what makes such disorganisation so appealing and so necessary.

The Bible and Homosexuality – Guidance for the Perplexed

16 Monday Jul 2012

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Recently I came across a new book that I thought shed some useful light on the issue of homosexuality from a Hebrew Bible perspective. The book is The Bible Now: Homosexuality, Abortion, Women, Death Penalty, Earth, by Richard Friedman and Shawna Dolansky. In fairly short space it sets out a summary of most of the major arguments about specific Biblical references to homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible, those Jewish scriptures which overlap to a considerable extent with the Christian Old Testament.

Firstly they are very clear that the law in the Biblical book of Leviticus (notably, Lev 18:22 and Lev 20:13) cannot simply be wished away (p. 26). So for those who regard the Hebrew Bible as their moral pole star, the prohibition on (male) homosexual behaviour in the Hebrew Bible has to be addressed. But at the same time, they argue that we cannot ignore the context of these references either. It is a very different context to that of most contemporary western readers. For one thing, people in the ancient near east did not make the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality as if it were a distinction between equal concepts. Heterosexuality was the norm across all these cultures. Homosexuality was not – as it is today in many parts of the world – a life-style choice or a marker of individual identity.

What these biblical prohibitions on homosexual behaviour seem to reflect in fact, is a widespread construction of sexual relations as relations of power; sexual encounters position each partner hierarchically according to whether their role is active or passive. So, for example, women are suitable sexual partners for men because their active domination by men has already been mystified in terms of their essentially inferior status. For the same reason, Friedman and Dolansky suggest, some encounters between men have also been socially condoned by association with this active/passive polarity.

The form of socially sanctioned homosexuality we know most about in the Western world – pederastia (boy-love) – existed as a more or less formalised system in Athenian society in the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE (p. 32). In this case, an older aristocratic male would court a young man of good family “much in the way a man might court a future wife” (p. 33), becoming his mentor and teacher, drawn by an attraction that was erotically charged even if not always acted upon. But tellingly, according to Plato (Symposium, 8,21), the young man – the eromenos – while respectful of his mentor – the erastes – was supposed to remain detached from his sexual passion. And once he reached adulthood and became his social equal, any continuation of a (passive/feminine) sexual relationship became shameful. In a similar way, Friedman and Dolansky look at references to homosexual acts between men in a number of other near eastern contexts containing similar associations between social status and sexual acts between men. (It is also interesting that Friedman and Dolansky insist that there is no prohibition on female homosexual acts in the Hebrew Bible.)

In other words, homosexuality, before the modern era, was always framed by considerations of social status and this forms the wider cultural background to the prohibtions on male homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. However there is also an important difference; male homosexuality is absolutely prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20. Friedman and Dolansky suggest that this has to do with the fact that the legislative text of which these prohibitions form a part – the Holiness Code (p. 34) – reflects a particular theology of the land. All the people who settle on God’s land, both Israelites and aliens, are bound by its ritual and moral law: “In the Holiness Code, there can be no homosexual acts at all in Israel, since by cross-cultural perception such intercourse would necessarily denigrate the passive partner and violate his equal status under God’s law” (p. 35). Even the servant and the foreigner in Israel are equal in God’s land. And, of course, it remains the case that what is seen as immoral in homosexual acts between men is not the nature of male homosexual desire in itself, but the potential violation of a social equal – an act that would pollute God’s land (p. 35).

In relation to the issue of homosexuality, the authors of The Bible Now, come down fairly and squarely in favour of reading the biblical text carefully and in line with principles of critical biblical scholarship. These principles are derived from the so-called ‘higher criticism’ developed first by European, principally German, University scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These principles have formed the basis of most reputable western biblical scholarly interpretation since then – whether it is Jewish, Roman Catholic or Protestant. In other words, they are concerned with scientific approaches to history – what here is mythology and what can be cross checked with other evidence and source material from the same period and region. They take due care to learn and understand the original languages of the Bible so they can answer the question, what did the words mean in the original context and how does that differ from the translation? They discuss the genre and style of writing, conscientiously distinguishing, for example, between poetry, prose and law: “It is is one thing to tell a story about something. It is another to write a poem about it. And it is a very different thing to write a law that says ‘Thou shalt no do it!’” (p. 1). And finally, they recognise that all readers come to the text with an agenda, a desire to know God’s truth or to find the basis of a moral norm or to reveal the gendered, colonialist assumptions of previous readers. No reading is neutral; hermeneutics or the interpretation of scripture must scrupulously attend to the who, when and where of all readers.

This useful treatment of homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible ends on a timely note of caution “Our purpose is not to talk you into one side or the other in these matters. Our purpose is to reveal that this is not a matter for amateurs, and it is not easy. You cannot just open a Bible – especially in translation – and find an obvious answer.” (p.39) Friedman and Dolansky, both University professors and career academics are employed to do the work of the scholar and this is a lifelong task. This relatively short and accessible treatment of homosexuality in the Hebrew Bible represents the distillation of an extended period of individual training and reflection and an even longer period of institutional development within wider communities. If we cannot any longer sponsor the development of this kind of professional expertise and learning – and in the UK, University departments of Theology and Biblical Studies are in rapid decline – it is going to be much harder in future, to make sense of our cultural inheritance or in any sense, to profit from it.

A week with Professor Naomi Goldenberg

27 Friday Apr 2012

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This week the Critical Religion Research Group has hosted Prof. Naomi Goldenberg from the University of Ottawa.

We have organised a staff/postgraduate seminar for her in Stirling, taken her to Aberdeen for a conference organised by Dr Trevor Stack (of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and the Rule of Law) on “Modernity and the Category of Religion” (at which our own Drs Timothy Fitzgerald and Alison Jasper also spoke), and organised a public lecture for her in London. There were also a considerable number of engagements and interactions with colleagues and postgraduate students that took place apart from these public appearances.

There has been considerable interest in her proposal that religions can be thought of as “vestigial states”, and we look forward to her further development of this work. There are various audio items relating to these themes available on our website. This should enable further dissemination of her ideas.

In the meantime, we would like to thank Prof. Goldenberg most heartily for her incredible energy and engagement this week: her readiness to debate so freely and so profoundly with us and so many other people in many different contexts, her graciousness with regard to the punishing schedule we organised for her, and her warm support for our work in the context of the Critical Religion Research Group – as well as her great sense of humour that encouraged and enriched us throughout the week.

We also want to record our sincere thanks to Simon Barrow of Ekklesia, our partner organisation, for his great engagement and support of this week – he has enabled so much to happen for us in relation to Professor Goldenberg’s visit, and we are immeasurably grateful to him. Ekklesia co-sponsored the public lecture in London, and suggested Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church as a venue, who welcomed us warmly and to whom we are also grateful.

There are a number of our postgraduate students who have helped with promotion and publicity, teaching cover and various other tasks: in particular, Sean Frye, Shani Zour and Chloe Erdmann deserve our thanks. Finally, for much “behind the scenes” support and assistance, we are immensely grateful, as ever, to our wonderful secretarial team, and in particular Jane Barber-Fleming, without whom so many things we have sought to do for this week would simply not have happened.

Timothy Fitzgerald, Andrew Hass, Alison Jasper, Michael Marten

Female Genius

16 Monday Apr 2012

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“Women today are far better off than women in the past. It’s time they shut up and stopped making so much fuss!”

Many things have changed for the better over the last couple of centuries, but the evidence that women are especially at risk simply because they are women is still available on a daily basis: In 2009-10, for example, about 9 incidents of domestic violence a day were recorded by the Central Scotland Police Force. Of these reported incidents – to say nothing of those that remain unreported – 88% were perpetrated by men against women.

A common response to this kind of evidence is to shift the discussion into comparisons. The suggestion is that much worse violence against women exists in “war-torn Africa” or “Islamic communities” or with people in “fundamentalist sects.” The thought that sexist structures that can breed violence on this scale, continue to characterise even so called progressive societies is quickly displaced, in this example, by a convenient connection between ‘religion’ and patriarchal oppression. In other words, progressive societies are seen to be essentially secular.

Of course, this represents a genuine dilemma for feminist theologians and critical scholars of religion because the case against Christianity is compelling and as feminists, they generally have no desire absolutely to deny this. And yet, dismissing Christianity simply as something to be thankfully consigned to history, means consigning all the achievements of women who have identified themselves as Christian alongside it; from this perspective, all Christian women are victims if not collaborators. Yet in its effects, this approach hardly differs at all from previous attempts by men to deny the achievements of women because of their gender.

To address this dilemma we first have to go back to the relationship between feminisms and the Western Enlightenment. This movement, celebrating the power of human reason to explain and harness the forces of nature, gave a powerful impetus towards feminist thinking by severing the connection between social order and a patriarchal God; without God the Father to give a warrant for the whole hierarchical order of being including women’s subservience to men, there was no reason why women should any longer buy into the myth of male supremacy. On the other hand, the key architects of the Enlightenment were far less successful in taking the divinity out of the human male and all things masculine, including a masculine distain for Christianity as a dangerous and irrational (feminine) superstition.

Moving back to the 1970s and 80s, feminist biblical critics, were still struggling to resolve the dilemma even as they worked to apply second wave feminist theory to Christian scripture. They were stll caught up in the double bind; struggling to draw attention to biblical women and women readers in a positive way, whilst at the same time trying not to let either patriarchal texts or the guild of (male) biblical scholars that interpreted them off the hook. Thus their readings of the bible recorded the presence of biblical women, yet very often these accounts focussed on the Bible’s “texts of terror” – its stories of casual violence, its reduction of women to mere objects or to the empty “otherness” that defined a real male presence. In other words they often ended up playing more strongly on the sense in which Christianity was unsympathetic to women than on the sense in which women might justly take their places as its crafters, sustainers and reformers. Yet, looking at the situation more positively, this was exactly what those scholars were doing in trying to address a complicated set of issues that didn’t respond easily to one approach. Sometimes in the hard-won pleasures of dialogue with these problematic structures they did manage, as writers and readers, to overcome all the built-in disadvantages with which they began as women in the male normative context of Church and academy.

In the last sixty years, there has been a vigorous growth in the kind of work that focuses on the lives of women. And, having so many more narratives about women to draw on, our imaginations are fed and our view of what women can do is dramatically widened. In this way, the scenario with which this piece began is also sharply challenged because we can begin to show that the contrast between the situation of women in the past and in the present is nothing like as polarised or final as this suggests.

Arguably, over the centuries, women have found many ways to negotiate problematic structures such as Christian patriarchy, crafting courageous, creative and at some level, pleasurable forms of engagement without necessarily rejecting it outright. Following the philosopher Julia Kristeva, I would call these women ‘female geniuses’ and have written about four such female geniuses in a forthcoming book Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius to be published this year by Baylor University Press. Look out for it!

Gender and the Vestigial State of Religion

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

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This is a guest posting by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg, introducing some of the themes she will be addressing when she visits the UK in late April 2012.

 

My interest in critical religion originates in my wish to restart the radical feminist work that used to be done in the subfield of “women and religion.”  For years I had been attending academic meetings in which scholars who spoke about the topic saw themselves as representatives of their own traditions or as apologists for traditions that were the subjects of their research.  Far-ranging critiques of sexist ‘religious’ beliefs, policies and practices, such as that of Mary Daly, had fallen out of favor.  In its place was a quieter, more respectful spirit of reform.  ‘Religious’ history was searched and mined for accounts of women who could be seen as clever agents within their traditions, as heroines who made the best of what was at hand, and as creative interpreters who found sustenance and inspiration in the seemingly oppressive texts and rites of their ‘faiths.’  Although the field of women and religion was flourishing in both divinity schools and secular universities, I was losing interest in an enterprise that I thought had abandoned the objective of political critique and embraced what I consider to be an attitude of advocacy for traditional thought and behavior.

I now think that feminist critical analysis in “women and religion” was blunted because the category of religion was not interrogated.  While deconstruction of concepts and politics related to gender and sex continues to foster exciting theory with significant social impact, religion itself remains largely an under-theorized given.  I believe that this tacit reification of  ‘religion’ works both to undermine women’s recent political achievements and to hinder further advancement.

Consider just these two examples: 1. From the U.S.: Citing the right to ‘religious’ freedom, Republican candidate Rick Santorum proposed allowing states to ban women’s access to contraception, a right won by means of court decisions in the late 1950’s.  Similarly, both Santorum and Mitt Romney, the front-runner for the nomination, objected to the new US health care law’s funding of legal abortions on the grounds that it could cause employers’ to compromise their religious beliefs.  Several newly-enacted state laws now restrict women’s access to health care related to reproduction on religious grounds.

And 2. – From Afghanistan: According to reports from the Guardian News Service, in March of this year, the Karzai government issued a statement asserting that women are subordinate to men, should not mix with men in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel.  The statement thus suggests that the Afghan constitution that enshrines the equality of men and women is flawed from a religious perspective.  Furthermore, violence against women as long as it is “sharia compliant” appears to be condoned.  Such news supports the opinion of Fawzia Koofi, the brave woman campaigning to be Afghanistan’s first female president, who says that David Cameron and Barack Obama are supporting the Karzai government in talks with people who want to bribe the Taliban by limiting women’s freedom using ‘religious’ justifications.

By proposing that religions be considered vestigial states at least in regard to law and public policy, I hope to suggest one way of countering arguments that restrictions on women’s rights and freedoms for ‘religious’ purposes deserve more respect and attention than if such limits were to be put forward for merely ‘political’ reasons.  Throughout most of history, governmental organizations have been based on masculine hegemony.  According to the argument I am advancing, when governments are displaced they can persist within contemporary states as ‘religions’ that maintain their patriarchal origins and character.  Since women’s challenges to male domination have only met with some success in recent times within fairly contemporary forms of statecraft, if earlier states known as ‘religions’ are allowed too much authority over domains such as ‘the family’ or ‘the home,’ women will be the losers.   The two examples from the US and Afghanistan provide support for this line of theory.

Media representations of ‘religion’ in the Middle East

26 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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It is almost a truism to note that if the mainstream media is our only source of news regarding anything to do with religion (however that might be conceived) in the Middle East, or even the Middle East in general, we are in deep trouble.  Two acute reminders of this in the last week indicate to me just how problematic these things are.  Confusion about what is and what is not ‘religious’ is one of the key issues here.

The death on 17.3.12 of Pope Shenouda III, the leader for four decades of the Coptic Church, resulted in considerable confusion and demonstrable ignorance from many.  For example, an otherwise excellent Egypt correspondent for Al Jazeera, Evan Hill, put out this message on Twitter:

Shenouda’s house arrest in a desert monastery played a key role in defining the way he interacted with the political hierarchies and the importance he gave to monasticism.  Shenouda’s reluctance to criticise President Mubarak until shortly before his downfall is in part, no doubt, related to the fact that it was Mubarak who restored Shenouda to his former position, as I noted here.  Evan Hill, and Al Jazeera in general, are excellent sources of Middle East news – but this kind of thing does not reflect well on him or the network (though see my additional note below).

My second reminder concerned the BBC and UK broadcast news in general: on Thursday 23.3.12 I had the privilege of chairing an event for the Scottish Palestinian Forum at which Professor Greg Philo of the Glasgow University Media Group discussed the new book he and Mike Berry have written, More Bad News from Israel (2011) – a follow-up volume to their ground-breaking Bad News from Israel (2004).  The book covers UK TV news, and addresses the ignorance and imbalance in reporting that is anecdotally obvious to many, but substantiated with detailed statistical analysis by Philo, Berry and their team: even the audience at Thursday’s event, many of them already knowledgeable about the situation in the region and aware of the bias in the media, were shocked by some of the data that Philo discussed in his presentation and the questions afterwards.  Philo argued that a central issue is the failure to explain, or explain adequately, the context for news stories: the terms ‘military occupation’, ‘land expropriation’ and so on are hardly ever mentioned.  One of the most remarkable findings that emerged from the first edition of the book was that a significant number of people in the UK, from all socio-economic backgrounds, thought the Palestinians, not the Israelis, were the ones illegally occupying territory – an astonishing success on the part of the Israeli propaganda machine.

Of course, it is not only interesting to observe such bias and ignorance, but to ask where it originates.  After all, the Israeli government knows what it is doing, and has always done so: the issue of stolen land is key.  Philo cites Moshe Dayan in his book (and did so in his presentation), one of the key Israeli military figures in the early years of the conflict, who in 1956 at the funeral of an Israeli soldier famously said:

Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers. What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.

This kind of discourse is almost completely absent in the contemporary news media in our country.  It is certainly not a part of the BBC or ITV; Channel 4 News is slightly better.  In part, Philo explained, this is because the media reframe the conflict in terms that distract from the core issues of occupation, irredentism and discrimination.  One part of this reframing is to put it in ‘religious terms’ – the most common being that this is a conflict of Muslims against Jews.  Of course, this not only ignores the Christian Palestinian population who suffer under the occupation as much as their Muslim neighbours, but it also makes the conflict seem irrational: the Israeli propaganda enterprise (led by the Israeli government’s Orwellian-sounding ‘National Information Directorate) helps to further the notion that there is an intrinsic, irrational hatred on the part of Muslims against Jews: that if only the Palestinians would stop firing rockets, the Israelis would not ‘need’ to take reprisal action. That the Israelis tend to be the ones to instigate each round of the conflagration is ignored: my students are shocked when I tell them that the 2009 attack on Gaza by Israel, dubbed ‘Cast Lead’, began the previous year when the Israelis initiated an attack on Gaza on the day of the US presidential election – of course, the world’s media did not notice!  Instead Palestinian rocket attacks are presented as ‘irrational’.  Whether we approve of the use of violence or not, they are anything but irrational: under international law, resistance to illegal occupation is permitted, including through the use of force, and the rockets are an expression of that resistance when few other avenues for resistance appear to have any effect on Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinians.  There is, of course, a connection here to Naomi Goldenberg’s idea of religion as a vestigial state: if the conflict is about Muslims (a ‘religion’) against Jews (another ‘religion’) rather than Israelis oppressing Palestinians, it plays into the static and ahistorical nonsense propagated by the supporters of the ‘clash of civilisations’.

Such a reframing is in part, at least, a category error: not so much in that it wrongly ascribes the conflict to the ‘religious’ rather than the ‘political’ sphere – as much discourse has it – but in that it creates a distinction between these two as if they are opposing aspects of a self-contained and ontological binary.  We do not see such a distinction in other areas.  For example, economics correspondents reporting the UK budget last week explicitly discussed the party political consequences and not just the economic impact of the government’s decisions.  But the division between ‘religious affairs’ and ‘current affairs’ in media reporting is deeply problematic, and is surely in part a factor in Evan Hill’s ignorance about the profound importance of Shenouda’s relationship with Mubarak, as well as the distortions that emerge in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  We need a media that not only has the courage to address issues appropriately – the BBC, for example, as a public service broadcaster, is legally obliged to discuss Palestinian and Israeli views – but that also understands the damage that is done to media reporting when distinctions are made that reinforce or reify category distinctions, rather than diminish or subvert them.

 

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Additional note: I stated above that Al Jazeera is an excellent news service for the Middle East and global news.  There is one important caveat to this praise: it has significant failings in reporting on its immediate home turf.  Critical engagement with Qatar, or even near neighbours such as Bahrain, does not happen.  This is not unlike Russia Today: a serious news service for anything other than internal news about Russia.  It is notable, however, that the BBC’s failings extend beyond reporting on issues in the UK (a whole other issue!), but also to areas such as the Middle East.

The Archbishop Resigns

19 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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What seems to have crystallised as the key to Archbishop Rowan Williams’ somewhat early resignation from his job as head of the global Anglican Communion is the issue of sexuality. Over the last ten years a great deal of heat and not much light has been generated around this question in Anglican circles. We have seen socially conservative Anglicans continue to realise and idolise the heteropatriarchal symbolism of traditional Christian theology while socially liberal Anglicans, in contrast, stress its prophetic nature at the same time remaining individualistic in their visions of freedom. African clergy sense the force of former colonial relationships at work in criticism of their stance on gay clergy and marriage, while gay Christians feel viciously stripped of their humanity and similarly betrayed. It is no wonder, that his latest attempt to promote the spirit of cooperation and the Gospel through a global covenant having failed, Rowan Williams felt a wish to move on. Reconciliation, in this context, seems an impossible task.

Yet as more than one commentator has noticed, an interesting fact about all this internal Anglican sound and fury is that it has continued to be focussed on essentially ‘domestic’ issues. Though Rowan Williams has certainly spoken out in the last ten years about economic questions and matters of foreign policy he has remained an outsider looking in; one generally well-respected person commenting from a largely personal perspective, rather than the head of the Church militant advising the prime minister on policy and expecting to be heard. Although the Roman Catholic Church is a far bigger affair, much the same can be said both of it and its leadership. As Professor Naomi Goldenberg said in this blog recently, even this limited role as social commentator is always at risk of ‘being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion’. In fact the fate of the Archbishop provides a good illustration of what she writes about vestigial states, caught up as he is in this acrimonious and most unloving dispute over custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ both as a social institution and in relation to the Church’s own economy or inner arrangements.

To apply Professor Goldenberg’s analysis to this situation, Anglican Christianity, at one time, a fully integrated element of government, is now increasingly cordoned off from day to day influence by the deployment of the discursive category ‘religion’, that is defined in terms of its own insignificance in relation to the ‘secular’ state. Meantime and in some ways as a consequence of this cordoning off, the ideological character of the foregrounded and ‘secular’ state operates increasingly across the Western world by means of its own closed and self-referential system of economic and managerial justifications. Not really open to criticism, the secular state has acquired a normative status. So it is a matter of simple common sense that the Prime minister is not advised by an Archbishop guilty of ‘partisan posturing’ who should be cheered when he defends Christians but sent back to school when he suggests the Church might actually have something to say about social justice.

Applying Professor Goldenberg’s analysis, the Anglican church as a vestigial state will probably continue to be eager to take on ‘whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them’. So the wrangling over gay bishops will probably continue. Perhaps it is a good thing that the Christian Churches as a whole do not function non-vestigially in British society any more, and certainly, for Archbishop Williams it must be something of a relief not to wield that kind of power and responsibility. At the same time, it is also important to recognise that just because it calls itself ‘secular’ this in itself does not exempt the British nation state from criticism of its own decidedly ideological stance on matters from the special relationship with the United States and the future of the NHS, to the role of ‘religion’. One has to ask, what is it about Christianity and the Christian Churches that our so-called ‘secular’ government is so keen to hide from sight?

 

An Argument for Thinking of Religions as Vestigial States

12 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Ottawa

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This is a guest posting by Prof. Naomi Goldenberg, introducing some of the themes she will be addressing when she visits the UK in late April 2012.

 

My work at present is focused on developing the hypothesis that religions can be productively thought of as vestigial states.  I consider this to be one way of de-essentializing, demystifying and deconstructing the category of religion.  In general, the concept directs theory along two trajectories: one is the analysis of particular histories in which ‘religions’ are formed or solidified in distinction to ‘states’; another is a focus on classifications which current governments use to delineate spheres of power.  I understand that if the term vestigial state has any resonance, that it will be as a temporary, partial and provisional tool for building theory in critical religion.

My work draws on James Crawford’s discussion of what defines a state in the latest edition of The Creation of States In International Law (Oxford: 2006).  Although not without its critics, Crawford’s articulation of the contingencies attached to the idea of a ‘state’ remains an important touchstone in international law. I also refer to texts by Max Weber and Louis Althusser to make my argument that the control of violence is a basic tipping point between what I want to call a vestigial state and a fully empowered government.

Vestigial states tend to behave as once and future states.  They are always somewhat restive and are generally eager to take on whatever social, cultural and/or managerial functions the recognized state cedes to them.  For example, presently in contemporary nation states, categories of custom and law pertaining to the ‘family’ are considered proper spheres for ‘religious’ authority.  In contrast, economic policies and most forms of violence are currently placed outside of religious control.  Nevertheless, in some jurisdictions ‘domestic’ violence done in the name of religious practice is tolerated at times.  In general, whenever religions, i.e. vestigial states, claim rights in regard to police or military action, they risk being delegitimated in relation to the category of religion.  Thus, in regard to Islam, for example, terms such as ‘political Islam’ or ‘Islamist’ are invented to cordon off appropriate forms of Islam from those that contemporary nation-states consider inappropriate. I argue that Islam is in the process of being turned into a ‘religion’ – i.e. of being made ‘vestigial’ – within some contemporary nation states at the same time that it functions non-vestigially in other parts of the world.  Debates about Islam illustrate how ‘religion’ as a discursive category is employed as a means of control in Western democracies.

My hope is that scholars who specialize in particular historical periods and geographical regions might find the concept of vestigial state to be useful in a range of contexts.  Currently, I have a particular interest in the shrewd initiative by the Dalai Lama to separate his ‘political’ functions from his ‘religious’ ones by encouraging the democratic election of a political leader of the Tibetan people.  Thus is Tibetan Buddhism being constructed to conform ever more coherently with the category of ‘religion’ as a way of limiting the powers of future Dalai Lamas whom China will try to name and control.  In my terms, the Dalai Lama is defining himself as a leader of a vestigial state in order to create a separate sphere of ‘political’ leadership that might escape Chinese influence.

The hypothesis that religions be thought of as vestigial states works well when applied to Jewish history in a manner consonant with the work of Daniel Boyarin in Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Un. of Pa.: 2004) and Seth Schwartz in Imperialism and Jewish Society 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: 2001).  Boyarin argues that ‘Judaism’ as a religion is created over the centuries in dialogues with Christian theologians.  I argue that such discursive production is perhaps secondary to the machinations of state powers that had to deal with Jews as a conquered ethnic group within their jurisdictions.  Schwartz’ hypothesis that the village evolves as a ‘religious community’ within a state supports my argument that ‘religions’ arise as ways of granting attenuated powers to displaced governments.

Groups aspiring to have the status of ‘religions’ often use narratives that identify with former sovereignties both real and/or semi-fictional. Contemporary forms of Wicca, for example, posit an ancient history in which governments were organized according to the principles Wiccans now follow.  Thus, Wiccans might be seen as imagining their covens as vestigial embodiments of previous sovereign governments.

The nostalgic reference to a former deity or deities as a means of supporting current governmental power is a common theme in Western history and literature.  I draw on my background as a classicist to highlight this trope in the Theogony of Hesiod in regard to how the reign of the Titans is cited when the Olympians triumph over them.  I also mention Athena’s treatment of the Furies in Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  In both cases, although the term ‘religion’ is somewhat of an anachronism in ancient Greece, the succession of sovereignties is nevertheless marked by relegating former ruling orders to the status of a cult, i.e, a vestigial state.

Examples of the ritual citation of religious vocabulary as a way of authorizing so-called secular governments abound.  President Eisenhower’s move in 1954 to add the words “under God” to the US pledge of allegiance is one instance of how religion is conjured as a type of previous sovereignty on which present powers are based.

Conceptualizing religions as vestigial states has value for clarifying matters pertaining to supposed qualitative differences between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ law.  According to my reasoning, such a distinction is more productively thought of as occurring between two forms of ‘states’ with markedly similar processes involving contingency, debate and compromise, something I will draw out further in my forthcoming presentations.