Tag Archives: modernity

Critical Race and Religion

01 Tuesday Oct 2019

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By Malory Nye

What does a Critical Religion approach have to do with race, and in particular in what ways should Critical Religion make central an engagement with Critical Race theory?

Tim Fitzgerald (e.g., 2008, 2012, 2015) – and others on this blog – have very clearly set out the agenda for a Critical Religion approach, much of which I strongly agree with. Thus, my own starting point for the study of religion is that this entity that gets called ‘religion’ (a thing that is not-a-thing) is bound up closely with another ideological entity that is called modernity (Asad 2003; Fitzgerald 2007). The discourse of religion is an integral part of modernity. Thus religion and secularity are conjoined; the development of modernity is in itself a product of the construction of an idea of secularity – the separating out of certain elements of power and social organisation into discourses of the non-religious.

However, the story does not end there: modernity is a much larger concept which works to produce a series of further ideological (taken-for-granted) categories. Concepts such as ‘politics’, ‘property’, and ‘markets’ have been well discussed in this respect, but I would add to this other key analytical terms such as gender, race, sexuality, and ability (along with of course religion) – these are all discourses of analysis and categories of social difference. That is, the modern world takes for granted not only certain assumed biology-derived differences between men and women, hetero- and non-hetero- sexualities (particularly homosexuality), whiteness and colour (particularly Blackness), and so on. And within such distinctions there are differences between religions – in particular, between Christocentric practice and others (in what is often called the ‘world religions paradigm’, cf. Masuzawa 2005).

In addition, modernity produces such differences – providing material advantages and privileges for those who are identified as white, male, and hetero and thus causing disadvantage (often through systemic or actual violence) to those who are considered as non-white, non-male, and non-hetero. Needless to say, these identities and discourses (and the violence that comes from them) often overlap and intersect. Violence and disadvantage is directed against Blackness, against women, and against gays, but it is also particularly focused when these categories intersect – against Black women, against Black LGBTQ, and so on. To talk of such categories and identities requires an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1989; hooks 1987; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016) that focuses not only on the categories in themselves, but also on their intersections (or assemblages, cf. Puar 2007:212; 2014).

Again, religious identities are often implicated across and within such intersections. This is not to say that a ‘thing’ called religion can be ‘found’ in or ‘influenced’ by other categories such as gender, race, and sexuality. Instead, the discourse or category of religion is very often assumed to be a significant element of differentiation. This may be in terms of long standing intra-Christian religious categories (such as Protestant or Catholic), or categories that presume racialized differences, such as between (white) Christians and (non-white) others such as Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. Again there are layers of other categories intersecting across these categories of religion – such as, of course, the persistent gender-based ‘concerns’ about Muslim women (in particular clothing, freedom, etc.), about Muslim women’s sexuality (covering up and unveiling), and assumptions about Muslim men and violence (as ‘terrorists’, wife-abusers, and sexual predators).

Thus, it is important to think beyond the idea of each of these categories as existing separately and in themselves (as ‘sui generis’). The categories of gender, race, sexuality, and religion (and secularity) are all products of modernity, and within the context of modernity they are practised through their intersections. There is no single practice of gender – of maleness or femaleness – but instead each context also relies on the other categories: masculinity is racialized, sexualized, and religionized. This is one of the ways in which modernity works.

However, my main interest is in how the category of race works. And so, I argue in particular for a critical race and religion approach. This puts a central focus on how religion and modernity are the product of European colonialism, which is an ongoing project – what Quijano (2007) and others have labelled as the ‘colonial matrix of power’, or more simply as modernity/coloniality. Both race and religion are the grammar of this historic and present day coloniality.

This leads me to questions of how religion is racialized, or more particularly how the process of talking about religion (religionization) is in itself a form of racialization (Nye 2018, 2019). As Theodor Vial has recently argued:
‘Race and religion are conjoined twins. They are offspring of the modern world. Because they share a mutual genealogy, the category of religion is always a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly under discussion…’ (Vial 2016, 1).

The categories of both race and religion are products of modernity, and both relate to entities imagined to be ‘real’ and which are socially constructed (and hence are real). My issue is that the differentiation between these categories obfuscates more than it reveals – for example, in the extensive debates about whether Islamophobic violence against Muslims can be categorised as ‘racism’ since (as claimed) ‘Muslims are not a race’; or whether anti-semitism is about religious or racialised hatred. This is not merely an academic concern about categorisation, it obviously spills out into very real and pressing issues. And most importantly, this slippage and mutual construction between categories of race and religion is not a recent development, the study of religion has for centuries been dependent on the ambiguities of whether religious groups are racialised or vice versa. Critical religion is about the study of such racialisation.

However, discussion of race also requires acknowledgement of the ‘elephant in the room’: the ideology and identity of whiteness. That is, the racialising aspect of modernity that places white identities as the driving forces of all other aspects of modernity/coloniality. Of course, such whiteness is usually obscured and ignored, but has still dominated public and political life, as well as academic discourses (cf., Sara Ahmed, 2014 on ‘white men’). To raise the issue of whiteness is to talk about the water in which scholars and their readers swim, the air that they breathe – it is there, but not noticed. It is invisible and seen everywhere. Mills (2017) and Wekker (2016) talk of this as white ignorance and innocence, and Bhambra (2017a) talks of methodological whiteness. Of course, in the study of religion this is as simple as pointing to the centrality of issues of Christianity and white Europeans (and other people who racialise themselves as white), and the long-term use of a paradigm that classifies all others who are outside this into ‘world religions’. Thus, the analysis needs to try ‘to understand both the ways in which race, as a structural process, has organised the modern world and the impact that this has had on our ways of knowing the world’ (Bhambra 2017b). In short, the concept of religion (and more broadly the academic study of religion) serves the interests of such whiteness.

Therefore, (what gets called) religion is an important part of this colonial matrix of power, albeit ‘it’ does not stand alone or distinctly. (What gets called) religion is part of an intersecting system involving categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. In this respect, the idea of the study of religion is a product of a very particular form of modernising theory (that is, of a distinct entity of religion, which stands out from secularity and non-religion). A critique of such theoretical and methodological whiteness suggests that this modernist study of religion needs to be reconsidered, as it is a tool of colonial power (both past and present).

References
Ahmed, Sara. 2014. “White Men.” Feministkilljoys Blog. 2014. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Bhambra, Gurminder K. 2017a. “Brexit, Trump, and ‘Methodological Whiteness’: On the Misrecognition of Race and Class.” The British Journal of Sociology 68 (November): 214–32.
———. 2017b. “Why Are the White Working Classes Still Being Held Responsible for Brexit and Trump?” LSE Blog, November 10, 2017. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/11/10/why-are-the-white-working-classes-still-being-held-responsible-for-brexit-and-trump/.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Policies.” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989 (1): 139–67.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2007. Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. Sheffield: Equinox.
———. (ed). 2008. “Religion Is Not a Standalone Category.” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, October 29, 2008. https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/10/29/religion-is-not-a-standalone-category/
———. 2012. “The Breadth of Critical Religion.” Critical Religion Association, November 9, 2012. https://criticalreligion.org/2012/11/09/the-breadth-of-critical-religion/.
———. 2015. “Critical Religion and Critical Research on Religion: Religion and Politics as Modern Fictions.” Critical Research on Religion 3 (3): 303–19.
Hill Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hooks, bell. 1987. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. London: Pluto Press.
Masuzawa, Tomoko. 2005. The Invention of World Religions: How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. London: University of Chicago Press.
Mills, Charles W. 2017. “White Ignorance.” In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nye, Malory. 2018. “Race and Religion: Postcolonial Formations of Power and Whiteness.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, July.
———. 2019. “Decolonizing the Study of Religion.” Open Library of Humanities 5 (1): p.43.
Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke University Press.
———. 2014. “Reading Religion Back into Terrorist Assemblages: Author’s Response.” Culture and Religion 15 (2): 198–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2014.911045.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’.” Cultural Studies 21 (2): 168–78.
Vial, Theodore. 2016. Modern Religion, Modern Race. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press.

On ‘Innovation’: Professor Helga Nowotny’s Recent Gifford Lecture

01 Monday Jun 2015

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For participants in the Critical Religion network, Professor Helga Nowotny’s recent Gifford lecture, ‘Beyond Innovation. Temporalities. Re-use. Emergence’, delivered in the Edinburgh Business School on the 13th May this year is not without interest. The Gifford Lectures, were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820–1887), a senator of the College of Justice in Scotland. The purpose of Lord Gifford’s bequest to the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrews and Aberdeen was to sponsor lectures to “promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term—in other words, the knowledge of God”. Since 1888 a remarkable and diverse range of contributors have maintained the enduring prestige of the Gifford Lectures. The summary notice circulated in advance of Professor Nowotny’s lecture stated that:

The quest for innovation has become ubiquitous. It is high on the political agenda and raises hopes where few alternatives are in sight. It continues to be equated with the dynamics of wealth and even job creation and is hailed as solution to the major challenges facing our societies. Yet, as Schumpeter observed more than one hundred years ago, innovation is not only disruptive, but can also be destructive.

A distinguished Austrian-born social historian of science, Professor Emerita Helga Nowotny of the ETH in Zurich set herself the task of exposing some of the paradoxical difficulties that attend the tensions between the rhetorical representation and the realities of ‘innovation’. Drawing in passing upon Marx and Weber as architects of ideas of modernity, Nowotny then settled as intimated upon a third figure, the Austrian economic thinker and historian of economic analysis J. A Schumpeter, and his conception of innovation as ‘creative destruction’. Innovation is not just technological but social, so that, for example, the quest for the quantum computer when successful will have a heavy impact upon the temporalities by which we live. We have to find a balance and trade-off between explanation and exploitation, whilst also being conscious that the reification of ‘innovation’ in an entrepreneurial culture (in particular that of the United States) can be misleading.

n reality, much so-called innovation is in fact ‘recombination’, and Nowotny illustrated this by reference to the ‘shock of the old’ in the juxtapositional work of the artist David Jablonski. In pointing out how mixed the outcomes of prediction can be, she also related her qualifications of the concept of ‘innovation’ to John Maynard Keynes’ optimistic vision in his Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930), in which “I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of … traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable”. Technological unemployment might, Keynes foresaw, free humankind for a higher form of existence for which we had to prepare, but present day workplace realities are very different. In short, the most brilliant minds can get things badly wrong, and the gist of Nowotny’s message was that what may save us then we come to the fork in the road ahead of humankind is the capacity to resist binary division and develop informed both/and responses to global crises rendered deceptively manageable because of the inherent unpredictability of innovation. Innovation leads to paradoxical consequences: the ‘natural’ in a post-human world is extremely complex and fraught with problematic real world juxtapositions highlighted by, for example, the contrast between the rapid take-up of cellphones in India as compared with slow increase in levels of basic sanitation.

‘Theology’ in however a vestigial form was very difficult, indeed scarcely possible to detect in Professor Nowotny’s lecture which could not be was not readily assimilated under the rubric laid down by Lord Gifford. Of course such resistance is not without precedent, given that the eminent Swiss-German theologian Karl Barth made it an essential part of his life’s work to deny the possibility of ‘natural theology’, albeit from a very different standpoint. What was, however, very much in evidence was Professor Nowotny’s defence of a distinctive kind of truth-seeking. She argued for the necessity of fundamental research freed from the immediate and all-encompassing diktats of what we in the United Kingdom are required to register in the metrics of socio-economic ‘impact’. Above all, for this listener, Professor Nowotny’s Gifford Lecture was a plea for a renewed sense of global responsibility informed by the full panoply of the ‘human sciences’.

Whilst there was to be a discussion the following day facilitated by the former Episcopalian Bishop of Edinburgh, Bryan Smith, it was disappointing that no questions were posed following the lecture by any of the many theologians currently active in Edinburgh. For this listener, Professor Nowotny’s critical account of the concept of ‘innovation’ was compelling. The risks raised by the unpredictability and unintended consequences of innovation give rise to a conundrum. The character of innovation might suggest that education, and in particular higher education should serve to develop an informed and agile responsiveness to change. By contrast, the societal reality of totalising managerial modernity is manifested in the urge of governments to impose ever greater degrees of control over our lives, and to understand ‘Quality’ as ever more sophisticated protocols of conformity. If, however, innovation is unpredictable then how can we know what we are directed to do will be the right thing? The posing of this question provoked a ripple of recognition in the audience, but no adequate response from the admirable Professor Nowotny.

Marian apparitions – a challenge to established categories

02 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Critical Religion, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich

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Emile Zola noted in 1892 about the newly built Lourdes basilica that its effect was “very shimmering but not especially religious”. The aesthetics of the Lourdes complex, with its mix of architectural styles and generous use of electric lights, was only one of many elements of the Marian apparitions that did not sit well with critics. Interestingly it was not only the reactionary politics behind the Marian cult but particularly the modern aspects like the consumerism or use of mass media at Marian apparition sites that were criticized by many liberal and progressive observers as unworthy of a true religious spirit.

But it would be misguided to simply continue the 19th century tradition and label these aspects as aberrations of an otherwise pure religiosity. As Suzanne K. Kaufman has shown, republicans used the controversy around Lourdes to construct a dichotomy between an acceptable private, nostalgic religiosity and its debased modern public forms in order to “relegate its practices to the margins of modern political and economic life”. (80)

The background for this was that the developments at Lourdes and other Marian apparition sites challenged the monopoly of the secular world view for presenting viable visions for modernity and progress. Marian apparitions showed that reactionary values could go very well with modern technology, mass media and the market. The apparitions themselves were also highly political, not only in the sense that they brought existing tensions to the fore as in the case of violent clashes between Catholics and state troops following claims of Marian apparitions during the German Kulturkampf, but innately through the messages conveyed by the seers to the people.

Academia is increasingly taking “strong religion” (Almond et al. 2003) into account, yet the preconceptions about what the term is supposed to designate are strongly influenced by militant Islamism and its scripture based forms of fundamentalism that dominate the news since 9/11. Marian apparitions, however, are not primarily rooted in scripture but distinctively modern. Mary, the mother of God, appears in the here and now with a message tailored to the circumstances of the time, often choosing places undergoing drastic transformation: Fatima called for a bulwark against communism, La Salette summoned to a disciplined Christian life on the brink of the 1848 revolution. The still on-going messages at Medjugorje that started a decade before the Balkan war spread the message of peace as did the apparition of Mary in Kibeho, where one of the major genocides of the Rwandan war took place.

At Lourdes, the Assumptionists realized the political potential of the Marian apparition site when they chose the National Pilgrimage as their key instrument for driving forth their mission of re-Christianizing French society from individual to government. Also, what is overlooked when speaking in derogatory terms about the devotional kitsch associated with Marian apparition shrines is that these mass produced items could powerfully forge and express identity as they served as “a rival set of emblems” (Blackbourn, 1993: 27) to the omnipresent national symbols of allegiance like the Tricolour.

Of course, the status of Marian apparitions is highly contested. Catholics are not obliged to believe in any of the accepted apparitions, and not only rationalists may find it difficult to believe that God sends Mary today to speak on day-to-day politics. Yet one should keep in mind that those who write off Marian apparitions as degenerated forms of religion and hence as imagined have an agenda, too. Religion, politics, modernity and the market do not come in neat boxes, and we should be wary of anyone trying to package these terms according to their needs. Marian apparitions are an underestimated phenomenon of modernity that can shed new light on the contested conceptualisation and construction of religion from the 19th century onwards.

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Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms Around the World, by Gabriel A. Almond, R. Scott Appleby and Emmanuel Sivan. University of Chicago Press, 2003

Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by David Blackbourn. Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Consuming Visions: Mass Culture and the Lourdes Shrine, by Suzanne K. Kaufman. Cornell University Press, 2005