Tag Archives: religion-secular binary

Call for Papers: “Religion as a Changing Category of Muslim Practice”

22 Friday Feb 2019

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One-day workshop on 24th May 2019 at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

Deadline for proposals: 28th February 2019.

Organisers: Dr Alex Henley (alex.henley@theology.ox.ac.uk) and Nabeelah Jaffer (nabeelah.jaffer@pmb.ox.ac.uk).

This workshop will focus on ‘religion’ as a changing category in modern Muslim practice.  Participants are invited to share case studies from their research as a basis for discussion of the possible insights to be gained by bringing critical approaches to the category ‘religion’ to bear on our study of Islam.

The aim of the meeting is to support and encourage such fledgling studies, sharing both methods and findings in order to identify: effective methodologies; a useful conceptual vocabulary; common patterns among diverse case studies; degrees of variation across contexts; and potential new avenues for research. To this end, participation will be open both to researchers already focusing on these themes and those interested in exploring these aspects of their empirical work further.
For further details and submission guidelines, see here:

https://www.pmb.ox.ac.uk/content/religion-changing-category-muslim-practice-one-day-work-shop

A Sociology of Religion Category: A Japanese Case

14 Monday Apr 2014

Posted by in Critical Religion, Shumei University

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Over recent decades, the academic concept of ‘religion’ has been examined critically by a number of scholars, especially, in Religious Studies. First of all, I would like to suggest, as a sociologist, that sociological discourse on religion (‘Sociology of Religion’) should be a subject of the same kind of critical examination. In the light of this scrutiny, I would like to take the concept of ‘religion’ itself as a subject for sociological investigation, and tentatively call this approach ‘Sociology of Religion Category’. Finally, I would like to demonstrate what a sociology of religion category might probably look like, by briefly examining the social construction of ‘religion’ in Japan.

Conceptualisations of ‘religion’ in Marx’s, Weber’s and Durkheim’s writings, for example, have been significantly influential over subsequent sociological discourses on religion. The existing literature focusing on their writings on religion implicitly indicates that the concept of ‘religion’ utilised by each Founding Father carries various historical and cultural baggage, specific to the society in which each of them lived, not necessarily denoting exactly the same social phenomena and the same aspect of human activities as each other. Likewise, it can be assumed that the notions of ‘religion’ shared by contemporary sociologists might have different meaning and nuances from those of the Founding Fathers, although they might also share some similarities.

Given this, the religion category in sociological discourse needs to be critically examined in the ways which have been carried out in Religious Studies. In my view, however, this has not been considered by many sociologists. When such an examination is posited, sociologists become defensive or positively acknowledge the criticisms but only partially reflect them in their own sociological discourses of religion, continuing the analytical use of the concept.

More importantly, such critical examinations of ‘religion’ can be extended to outside sociological literature, analysing the construction of religion category (and nonreligion categories) in the wider social context. Taking the critique of the term ‘religion’ seriously, studying religion sociologically should mean critically examining how the category of religion came into existence in the first place, in a particular social context; how particular value orientations and organisations have come to be socially categorised as ‘religion’; and what kind of assumptions and beliefs govern inclusion in and exclusion from, the category. This is what I call ‘Sociology of Religion Category’.

Now I would like to briefly examine the religion category in Japan in order to demonstrate a sociology of religion category.

In his book The Invention of Religion in Japan, Jason Josephson demonstrates how the concept of ‘religion’ was introduced to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. When Japanese translators first encountered the English word ‘religion’ in the 1850s, there was no indigenous equivalent. It was during the Meiji period (1868-1912) that the term ‘religion’ was gradually indigenised as a concept which included Christianity and Islam as well as Buddhism, with cultural baggage from the West, denoting a Christian notion of belief, especially that of Protestantism. ‘Religion’ as a newly imported concept was translated into Japanese in a number of different ways, but in the 1880s the word shūkyō established its place in the Japanese language as the translation of the term ‘religion’.

Importantly, the social category of shūkyō was constructed outside the realm of the Shinto national ethos (or ‘Shinto secular’). The state classified Buddhism, Christianity and sectarian Shinto (which had divorced from the state-authored Shinto institution) as shūkyō and utilised them as a means of ‘moral suasion’. Through the operation of interpellating or hailing particular groups and value orientations as shūkyō, the state had successfully made them docile and mobilised them for propagating the national ethos to the population. Any popular movement outside this state-religion coalition, which did not harmonise with the orthodoxy of Shinto secular, constituted the heterodoxy called at best ‘pseudo religions’ (ruiji shūkyō), and at worst, ‘evil cults’ (jakyō). They were subject to harsh persecution.

The social category of shūkyō was reformulated after the Second World War during the Allied Occupation between 1945 and 1952. While the pre-war category of shūkyō was limited to the ‘three religions’ (i.e. Buddhism, Christianity, sectarian Shinto), the post-war category of shūkyō includes various other faith groups, which would have constituted the pre-war heterodoxy. They are currently termed (mainly by scholars) as ‘New Religions’ (shin-shūkyō) or ‘new New Religions’ (shin-shin-shūkyō). Importantly, it also includes Shinto, which constituted the pre-war Japanese secular. After Japan surrendered to the Allies on 15 August 1945, the first task of the Allied authority was the demolition of the pre-war Shinto secular. The so-called Shinto Directive, issued by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Power (SCAP) on 15 December 1945, effectively reduced Shinto to the status of a voluntary organization by defining Shinto as a religion.

In addition, the post-war Japanese religion category was configured as an ostensible entity which is somehow distinguishable from the state. However, this constitutional separation has not been clear-cut. One example is ‘official visits’ by the prime minister and his cabinet to the Yasukuni Shrine. The interpretation has been polarised along ideological lines between right and left. The Japanese right perceives visiting Yasukuni as an expression of patriotism, while the left sees its veneration as a ‘religious’ act, therefore, in breach of the constitutional separation of religion and state.

Another example of the ambiguity of the term is how the Japanese term shūkyō is deployed strategically in people’s everyday language. For example, most Japanese people associate the term shūkyō with Christianity and Islam as well as ‘New Religions’ and ‘new New Religions’. The stereotypical image of these specifies that adherents show their commitment to daily practice of their faith, including a participation in activities to propagate their beliefs to others. For this reason, the Japanese are likely to identify themselves as ‘nonreligious’ (mushūkyō) when they are asked the question: ‘Do you believe in any religion?’ The claim of mushūkyō could be seen as an expression of the social norm, to which the emphasis on personal faith is fundamentally alien. The social norm of mushūkyō discursively and symbolically eliminates shūkyō from the structure of social relations, as a source of conflict, disharmony, or ‘pollution’, in order to maintain the existing order.

What various sociological studies of ‘Japanese religion’ have indicated, but not discussed extensively, is that the term ‘religion’ has been employed strategically at different levels of society, in order to distinguish what is called ‘religion’ from what is in turn defined as nonreligion or the secular. What remains to be investigated critically are the ways in which the boundaries between religion and nonreligion or the secular, are demarcated.

Disorganised Religion? We need more of it!

27 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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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.

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.

The myth of religion and the tyranny of Richard Dawkins’ discontinuous mind

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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In his New Statesman article “The tyranny of the discontinuous mind” [NS 19 Dec 2011 – 1 Jan 2012] Richard Dawkins suggests how arbitrary our classificatory dividing lines are. And yet the substance of his arguments rests on precisely such a dividing line – the one between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ or, put in a different way, between ‘faith’ and ‘secular’ reason. The heart of Dawkins’ untenable position is that he imposes on his readers the tyranny of his own absolutist distinction between scientific rationality and religious faith. When Dawkins criticises our “need for dividing lines, black-and-white answers and absolute definitions” he is not, it seems, including the dividing line which he draws between ‘religion’ and ‘science’, or between ‘faith’ and ‘politics’. In his writing it is an ‘either-or’ situation. Creationist theories of evolution might look scientific, but its not ‘real science’. The Mullah might look like a ‘religious’ leader, but he’s really a politician.

My contention is that the essentialized distinction between religion and secular reason deployed by Dawkins and fellow travellers such as Christopher Hitchens is thoroughly ideological, but its rhetorical deployment has created the delusion that it merely describes the way the world really is. Some thing or agent called ‘religion’ with its absurd metaphysical fantasies interferes with nonreligious realities such as secular states and proper knowledge. But this narrative is itself a myth.

Religion is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories

Dawkins argues that an uncritical belief in metaphysical abstractions or Platonic essences [“…one of the most pernicious ideas in all history…”] can provide a fictitious ontological legitimation for racist categories, making the arbitrary and contingent appear fixed in the nature of things. This seems like a valid point. In a similar way feminists have persuasively shown that the typical deployment of gender categories legitimates male power at the expense of women by making gender inequality seem ‘natural’, in the nature of things. Dawkins discusses the ideological imperatives that lie behind the classification of US leaders such as Colin Powell and Barak Obama as ‘black’, pointing out that such a loaded classification could never be neutral or merely descriptive. Yet unfortunately Dawkins’ arguments rest on a similar mythical dividing line represented by a series of either-or binaries: religion and nonreligion, the natural and the supernatural, faith and scientific knowledge, God and the world. However, there is nothing given in perception and empirical observation that corresponds to any of these binary reifications. These are mutually parasitic reverse-images which, when studied in the multiple contexts of their actual uses, can easily be seen to have no clear dividing lines between them. There is no possible authoritative pronouncement about what does or ought to fall on either side of the binary apart from an arbitrary exercise of power.

The distinction between ‘religion’ and the nonreligious secular is itself a pure abstraction with no basis in empirical reality and very little meaningful content outside the shouting space of public rhetoric. When courts have to decide if a particular group is eligible to be classified as a religious charity the results are arbitrary. To take one example, the Church of Scientology is a religion in California but not in the UK. But both the respective courts which made these different decisions are classified as ‘secular’. But then why is the realization of justice in our lives, and the faith we have in the solemn procedures of the courts, not itself a form of religious practice? Does Dawkins really imagine that sharia law is essentially religious but the judicial system in the UK is essentially secular?

Religion as a malevolent agent stalking the peace-loving secular state

The religion which Dawkins attacks from his base in secular reason, and which he and Hitchens seem to imagine as a purposeful agent, is not a real target. But it is required so that the equally contentless idea of a nonreligious secular domain appears as something essentially different from religion in the way that paranoid fantasy is different from sober reality. Belief that there is something clearly distinct in the world called religion disguises the ideological commitments of the classifiers behind a façade of apparently neutral, objective description. The ability to point at Muslims as religious fanatics is subtlety linked to a wider discourse in, for example, International Relations, that wherever we look religion stalks the globe like a malevolent agent intent on doing harm to the peace-loving and only reluctantly violent secular state. It provides an ideological legitimation for progress and the belief that ‘science’ and secular politics is what will save us. Science (and politics) is what religion is not, just as religion is what science is not. But this is to reify two domains which are both imaginary and to badly confuse the logic of the concepts he is deploying.

The religion about which Dawkins claims to be an expert does not actually stand for anything real in the world. It is a general category with a complex and contested history and I challenge him or anyone to come up with a satisfactory definition of what the term means. The religion which Dawkins and fellow traveller Hitchens despises is in effect no different from a Platonic essence in Dawkins’ theories, a Form which manifests in the different empirical ‘religions’ which he assumes without much thought are instantiations of religion itself. Dawkins’ notion of the relationship between religion and the religions is not much different from an incarnation or avatar theology.

Worse, by supposing an essential difference between religious faith and secular reason, secular science itself inevitably acquires an essence of its own, to distinguish it not only from religion but also from things that may look like science but are not real science.

Dawkins writes as though the natural world is available for empirical inspection, while the supernatural is a purely imaginary domain. But which world of nature is available for empirical observation? Where would you point if you wanted to show someone nature? ‘Nature’ has no clear referent. Terms like world and nature are general categories and if you eliminate the terms that give them a meaningful context there is no way any human can observe ’a world’ or ‘nature’. God might be able to see a world, I don’t know. But Dawkins and I most certainly can’t. And the interesting thing is that Dawkins’ category of nature and world is parasitic on a discourse about God and the supernatural. Just as the idea of ‘atheism’ is dependent for its intelligibility on the idea of ‘theism’, so also his claims about the essential difference between faith and empirical reason is essentially no different from an anti- theological metaphysics. Religion is Dawkins’ target because he needs it for self-definition. Dawkins is confusing his own subjective emotional needs for objectivity.

Dawkins needs a historical perspective

Dawkins works with a series of essentializing binary oppositions which are at the heart of his whole argument about the irrationality of religion and the rationality of secular science. In this he is not original, but on the contrary is blindly reproducing the framework of liberal capitalist ideology which underlies western public rhetoric and foreign policy since its birth during the era of colonialism

The essentialized distinction between religion and nonreligious secular domains such as science or politics seems to have been invented in the late 17th century within the combined contexts of Non-Conformity and colonial interests, but has taken on the unquestioned appearance of inevitability. A series of other binaries step in as equivalences: the natural and the supernatural, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, God and the world. One side of all these binary essentializations is rational and real; the other side is unreal and deluded. But this itself is as much a delusion as ‘the God delusion’.

Despite the argument that biological evolution has no direction, concepts like religion, secular, science, politics and the state are impregnated with ideological nuances which Dawkins seems unaware of. For example, as far as I can see, the earliest consistent usage of the term ‘politics’ as a domain separated from another domain called ‘religion’ dates to the late 17th century. The reified opposition between religious and secular domains arose historically out of an Enlightenment myth of human progress from the darkness of religion and superstition into the light of scientific reason. And his unexamined presuppositions are not essentially different from the dubious secularization arguments that legitimate the social sciences. The latter have acted as ideological agencies which transformed the meaning of ‘society’ from identifiable relationships between specific people (‘I was honoured to be in the society of the King and many eminent philosophers at Christmas’; or, at a more generalized level “I am a member of the Royal Society”) to the globalised metaphysical abstraction ‘societies’ which are in principle countable and measurable like organisms. This is the world of abstractions in which we all feel intuitively compelled to think today.

Of course, without general categories we could not think at all. But there are relative degrees of disinterestedness and neutrality in the way we classify our world. The binaries that appear throughout Dawkins’ preaching against ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ may use old words but the classificatory deployment – and therefore the meaning – is modern. They form a semantic configuration of categories which is profoundly different from late medieval and early modern meanings, and different again from the many complex collective representations of non-European peoples. But Dawkins writes and speaks as though ‘religion’ and its binary opposite the ‘nonreligious secular’ is an intuitive universal, applicable to all languages, peoples and power formations at all periods of history. That those people did not realize that they were in the grip of religious illusion is irrelevant. Now that Dawkins and others have finally attained the truly rational and the really real, they are in a position to make judgements about the predicament that the deluded are not yet ready to understand.

Cranes and sky-hooks

On the one hand, according to Dawkins, evolution proceeds through the on-going construction of cranes rather than by way of metaphysical sky-hooks; yet the idea that ‘religion’ (irrational faith) is something essentially different from ‘science’ (rational knowledge) derives from an enlightenment discourse on the progressive advancement of humankind from lower to higher stages. Dawkins may vehemently deny that evolutionary biology is akin to the myth of human evolution from lower to higher stages; yet though he has ostensibly dropped the purposive element of the myth, he has uncritically incorporated some of its fundamental mythemes. He has uncritically adopted a version of secularization which portrays the light of science as a doctrine of salvation by secular reason leading us out of the darkness of religious stupidity. And this self-serving ideology, heavily inflected with liberal Protestant supremacy, legitimized tutelage of non-European peoples by colonial civil servants, politicians, missionaries, and capitalists. Of course, Dawkins denies purpose or direction in evolution. Yet in his own evangelical texts, Dawkins is actually setting up the metaphysical parameters which he claims to want to expose as hollow.

What does ‘religion’ mean?

Since the Reformation the Anglophone term ‘religion’ (presumably much like the term in German, Dutch and French) usually meant Christian truth as distinct from pagan falsehood, and this distinction in turn was as much about dominant claims to Christian civility and rationality as it was about abstract theological disputes concerning ‘God’. Christian preachers have always been as concerned with whether women of a certain class have the right to wear large hats as they have been about the correct articulation of the Trinity. Protestant missionaries have been as concerned that the savage natives live in ‘proper’ houses and speak a proper language as they have been about defining the complex (and some would say polytheistic) Trinitarian and Incarnational doctrine which supposedly defines the nature of God for such Christians. Evangelical Christians today construct their own missions of conversion on the basis of this opposition between civility and barbarity. Religion in this more historically specific sense was not an object in the world to be researched, described and compared alongside other so-called ‘religions’, but the truth about the world, including the proper or improper disciplines of civility. In this older discourse there cannot be more than one ‘religion’.

But the historically more recent modern discourse on ‘religion’ – and ‘religions’ in the plural – has been reified and universalised as a generic category, lacking clearly specific content, opposed to the equally modern generic category the nonreligious secular. Terms which still have specifically Christian meanings in some contexts are being deployed by Dawkins (and many others) as though they are neutral, descriptive and self-evident.

Part of a wider ideological discourse

The mythemes embedded in Dawkins’ arguments for the supremacy of something called nonreligious secular science over another unanalysed abstraction called ‘religion’ are part of a much wider contemporary discourse which is being reproduced in one way or another by academics, politicians, media commentators, by courts of law, by constitutions and the general public. This discourse is now so dominant that to challenge its basic categories appears counter-intuitive and even eccentric.

This appearance of inevitability has been powerfully strengthened by its internalization and reproduction by leading members of those institutions typically classified as ‘religious’ themselves. A good case in point is the invention of ‘Tibetan Buddhism’ as a religion, and the relatively recent adoption of this global discourse by the Dalai Lama. Yet the news agencies report that the Chinese and the Americans differ absolutely on whether or not the Dalai Lama is a real religious leader who can safely visit Taiwan, or a political leader hiding behind the cloak of religion and therefore an agent of mischief. The success of Dawkins’ arguments depends on turning a blind eye to the historically contextualized, constructed and contested features of such powerful categories, and to the wider but not so obvious interests which they serve.

What is it that makes African witchcraft beliefs, Japanese public street festivals, Theravada meditation, Scientology, the Indian caste system, devotion to Elvis Presley, water divining, yoga, the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholic monastic communities, and Calvinist attitudes to work and productivity ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ according to very widespread contemporary usage? And why, given this eclectic bunch, should we exclude devotion to capital, private property, the accumulation of money, or the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the glory of the nation state? Why do we lump together such a vast spectrum of human practices globally into this simplistic either-or binary opposition: it is either religion or it is science? It is either ‘religious’ or it is ‘nonreligious’? It is either religion or it is politics? It is either spiritual or material? These are the mythemes of modern ideology which Dawkins innocently spins, imagining he is telling it ‘like it is’.

The very idea of ‘religions’ in the plural suggests the sharing of a common essence ‘religion’. But that in turn implies that the ‘nonreligious’ also has an essential dividing boundary. The reifications that Dawkins’ has unconsciously adopted (though he certainly didn’t originate them) are the mythemes on which his essentializing discourse depends and which are being reproduced by a whole range of agencies including the State and its educational and legal systems. Dawkins is ideological state apparatus. His arguments against the irrationality of something called ‘religion’ do not only and heroically reproduce that abstract and invented object, but simultaneously reconstruct the equally mythical secular basis of his own rational superiority.

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).