The Routledge Companion to Religion and Popular Culture

John C. Lyden, Eric Michael Mazur, John C. Lyden, Eric Michael Mazur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317531050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia delle religioni

Religion and popular culture is a fast-growing field that spans a variety of disciplines. This volume offers the first real survey of the field to date and provides a guide for the work of future scholars. It explores:

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• key issues of definition and of methodology

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• religious encounters with popular culture across media, material culture and space, ranging from videogames and social networks to cooking and kitsch, architecture and national monuments

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• representations of religious traditions in the media and popular culture, including important non-Western spheres such as Bollywood

This Companion will serve as an enjoyable and informative resource for students and a stimulus to future scholarly work.

Part I

Approaching the discipline of religion and popular culture

1

Definitions

What is the subject matter of “religion and popular culture”?

John C. Lyden

If a companion volume on a subject exists, one might presume that the editors have a pretty good idea of what the subject matter of that field is, and how it is best defined. The defining characteristics of any academic discipline or subject matter will, of course, be open to constant discussion as those involved with it continually revise their understandings of both its methodology and what properly constitutes its object. But for many fields of study, there is at least enough of a history of its study, or a semblance of orthodoxy about how to approach its study, that some degree of consensus exists about the field’s definition which can serve as a starting point for discussion. The subject matter of the study of religion, for example, has become a topic of considerable debate in recent years, but it has been around long enough that these debates can take place in the comfort of established departments in elite universities. The study of religion and popular culture, on the other hand, has not established a solid foothold in the halls of academia, perhaps because it is too recent in origin, or because it appears to lack the coherence and discernment required for inclusion.

In this chapter, it is not my aim to insist that such coherence is well established among those who study religion and popular culture, and only needs to be recognized; nor am I bold enough to propose a formula for such coherence on behalf of the nascent discipline. Rather, I would argue that the difficulties inherent in defining this field are not the result of its youth and indiscretions but are part and parcel of its subject matter. Furthermore, I would suggest that the difficulties inherent in defining the terms of this field of study are endemic to all study of religion and of culture, and that this sub-field therefore can offer a fine lesson to its more established parent disciplines that we should be wary of overconfidence in defining our subject matter. Although it is natural to wish for such careful definitions of our academic disciplines—especially when we are trying to justify adding a tenure-track position to our department—the fact is that all such definitions are quite artificial.

At the same time, as I will make clear below, this is not an argument that there is no subject matter for the field, as if academics invented it from their imaginations with no reference for the concepts in the world. There is something we call religion, and something we call popular culture, however contested and slippery the definitions of these terms remain. And not only can both of these be studied, but we can also study their interactions. At the same time, given the slippery nature of both religion and popular culture, that interaction is no easier to define than the terms, as they tend to mix together in ways that make it hard to see where one ends and the other begins. And yet again: this is due not to our lack of methodological sophistication in approaching them, but to the very nature of the things we label in these ways—as they combine and develop, raising questions about the very nature of religion and of culture which can have a bearing on how we may perceive both in the future.

To advance our understanding of the nature of the study of religion and popular culture, then, I propose to look at the problematic nature of each of the words in this italicized phrase, suggesting some of the difficulties inherent in defining them as well as the lessons that can be learned from this exercise. In the process, we can approach an understanding of the subject matter of the field of religion and popular culture—not by eliminating ambiguity, but by coming to realize that that very ambiguity in interpretation helps us to better understand the phenomena in question.

“Religion”

Although the study of religion or religious studies has existed in academia for some time, it has recently come under attack as an artificial concept that has been illegitimately imposed on reality, distorting the content it seeks to explicate. Jonathan Z. Smith has famously declared that, “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study” and therefore, “Religion has no existence apart from the academy” (Smith 1982: xi). More recently, this view has been further developed by scholars such as Russell McCutcheon (1999, 2001, 2003) and Timothy Fitzgerald (2000). Such scholars claim that the modern sense of the term “religion” as a separate aspect of culture, largely private and related to personal belief in a transcendent power, evolved as part of an attempt to justify the superiority of Christianity over other “religions.” Western colonialist attitudes to other cultures either suggested that these cultures had no “religion” (and so needed to acquire Christianity) or that their inferior “religions” required replacement by Christianity in order to correspond more clearly to the “true” notion of religion. “Religion” then appears to be a descriptive term, but actually functions normatively to exalt one worldview over another.

Such ideological critique of the concept of religion is important as it reveals the biases present in the concept since the development of the modern academic study of religion. It is particularly relevant to definitions that clearly import a Christian or Western bias, such as those that define religion in relationship to a single transcendent reality or a quest for salvation; the definitions of Schleiermacher, Otto, Eliade, and Tillich all appear to fall into this category (Lyden 2003: 37–40). Even definitions that are less obviously Western, however, may still be said to be based on Western theological assumptions that may be concealed by the ways in which they are stated.

But the recognition that “religion” is a construct, even one that has included bias, does not necessitate the conclusion that there is no object to which the study of religion corresponds. Kevin Schilbrack has argued that something is no less “real” for being socially constructed; it exists only in the framework of human societies, and not as a natural kind (like lightning, or frogs), and so “[r]eligion does not exist apart from human ways of thinking, speaking, and acting” (Shilbrack 2010: 1118). But politics, sports, and economics similarly do not exist apart from humans, and yet no one would suggest that what they describe does not exist; even though they describe “socially dependent facts,” it remains true that there are “realities” described by them, including elections, games, and business transactions.

Critics who would dispense with the term “religion,” however, also wish to do so because they believe that the concept distorts what it seeks to describe, and is ideologically motivated. They would claim we are well rid of the academic concept of religion for these reasons. But it is not only Western academics who use the term “religion”—practitioners use the term to refer to their own activities, even though it may not have arisen from within their own traditions. For that matter, individual “religions” have often been first “named” by outsiders (including Christianity and Hinduism), but the terms have then been accepted by insiders as a description of themselves. It might well be said that Christianity and Hinduism did not exist until they were so named, but that does not take away from the fact that they are identified as social realities now by their own members. In the same way, cultures have come to exist: “Native American” identity is a creation of outsiders, but has become a term of self-identification for those to whom it applies. In fact, the term “Indian” which preceded it functioned in much the same way; both terms can be seen as equally foreign to the peoples so named, but both have been accepted in various periods by the populations thereby designated as terms which unify them historically, religiously, and culturally, across traditional tribal lines.

It is also true that the scholar may use the term “religion” to apply to activities that are not so named by a group, if the term serves as a helpful way of interpreting the phenomena in question. Schilbrack argues that if the scholar recognizes features that relate to a particular definition of religion, and has not imposed those features on the phenomena in question, the term can be legitimately used, as “the interpreter is claiming … that there is a cultural pattern or structure that exists independent of the label of it as a religion and … the label of ‘religion’ fits or illuminates that pattern” (2010: 1124). Of course, one may debate whether the label illuminates or distorts; but to conclude a priori that it can only do the latter, seems to be a conclusion that would ignore all information to the contrary. The concept of religion has evolved over time in a variety of ways, as scholars have sought to better understand the features that are often classified by this term. Terry Godlove points out that although “religion” is an abstract intellectual construct, it is one based on empirical data, and our definitions of it have evolved as we seek to generalize and classify information which might fall under that term. As such, we are continually re-defining the term itself as the result of our study of phenomena, which informs the way we define the general term (Godlove 2010: 1040–41).

Furthermore, even if the term “religion” evolved out of an ideological desire to subjugate other peoples, this does not justify the genetic fallacy that because the term has been so used, it always will be so used for ideological purposes. As noted below, the term “culture” has an equally ideological history (having been used to condemn other “cultures” as inferior to one’s own) but those who argue for the abolition of the term “religion” do not seem ready to discard the term “culture” as well (Schilbrack 2010: 1130). Were we to stop using all words that have been used ideologically, we would be rendered mute in our descriptions of anything. A better alternative may be to continue seeking better understandings and definitions of the term which are informed by study of the phenomena we so classify, so that “religion” remains a useful category, although one in constant need of revision (just like “culture,” “ritual,” “myth,” or indeed any other terms evolved within fields such as religious studies, history, or social science).

I have devoted this much space to the critique of “religion” as a concept because it stands at the center of much academic discourse in what some might call “the field formerly known as religious studies,” and because this debate serves as a useful marker of some of the disputes about such labels that are apposite to the definition of our larger term, religion and popular culture. If “religion” does not exist, one can hardly speak about the larger term. But if it does, the disputes about its definition may also illuminate the slippery nature of all these terms, and the fact that one tends to blend into the other. This supports the contention of many scholars of religion and popular culture, including many of the authors of this volume, that we cannot neatly divide “religion” from “culture.”

When one looks to the definitions of “religion” used by scholars of religion and popular culture, we find a variety, as one would expect—but there are family resemblances among them. David Chidester defines religion as “the activity of being human in relation to superhuman transcendence and sacred inclusion, which inevitably involves dehumanization and exclusion” (2005: viii). He also acknowledges that this is hardly the only definition one might use, and that he has adopted this one for heuristic purposes of illuminating certain features of how religions function; in particular, he is interested in ritual performance and exchange, sacred objects, and experiences of community in sacred time and place (ibid.: 30–51). Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy resist giving a set definition, instead identifying a “set of markers that are suggestive of religious meaning” including “the formation of communities of shared meanings and values, the presence of ritualized behaviors, the use of language of ultimacy and transcendence, the marking of special, set-aside ‘sacred’ times and spaces, and the manipulation of traditional religious symbols and narratives” (2011: 6). They suggest that the presence of one or more of these markers merits an analysis in terms we could call “religious.” Bruce Forbes resists a definition of religion as well, as he is content to list some of the standard academic definitions along with their criticisms, but he also points to a range of phenomena that usually merit religious discussion such as devotional acts, ritual patterns, or “reflections on the struggles of life” (Forbes and Mahan 2005: 9).

I will also avoid giving a formal definition of “religion” here, noting only that the various aspects often associated with this term in both popular conversation and academic discourse make appearances throughout the chapters of this volume. The term is one that is under constant negotiation, and it may be sufficient to acknowledge that the debate about what is or is not religion is found here as well. In any case, the term has not disappeared, and it does appear to refer to a real set of human behaviors and activities.

“Culture”

The term “culture” first evolved in modern times out of the notion of the “cultured person” who has cultivated his or her capacities. This idea is often associated with Matthew Arnold, but also has roots in Francis Bacon’s resuscitation of the idea from Cicero, and the German notion of Bildung as the cultivation of the national virtues, such as that developed by Johann Gottfried Herder (Tanner 1997: 3–5). In this way, it functioned as a way to view the culture of one’s own group or nation as superior, and so in turn provided the ideological basis for colonialism and the “white man’s burden” to educate and civilize the “savage” or uncultured peoples of the world. Obviously, this was itself a rationale for controlling and exploiting the natural resources and human beings of these locales. (In these ways, it is much like the notion of religion critiqued by McCutcheon and others.)

This notion of culture then gave way to a more evolutionary idea that suggested cultures are not entirely distinct as previously thought, but instead the primitive evolves into the more complex; still, there is judgment implied on the “primitive” culture which tends to be associated with contemporary non-Western cultures, particularly those at a preliterate or tribal level (Tanner 1997: 16–18). Finally, this cultural evolutionism, associated with Social Darwinism and the notion of the superiority of the allegedly more advanced culture, gives way to the critique of Ruth Benedict (1934) and others in the development of twentieth-century anthropology. These thinkers embraced cultural relativism, the notion that no culture should be viewed as inferior to any other, as the differences should be embraced as expressive of the diversity of humans and not evaluated by any single cultural perspective (as none can claim that superior position) nor by any transcultural standard (as this does not exist, in their view).

It is indeed commendable that the cultural relativists criticized Social Darwinism as an illegitimate effort to justify colonialist exploitation in the name of Western cultural superiority. At the same time, cultural relativism was not entirely logically consistent. If there are no universal values, then the value of universal tolerance which cultural relativism seeks to espouse is also simply a particular cultural value, with no relevance beyond the cultures that hold it. If a culture prefers genocide and slavery as its values, cultural relativists cannot say those values are wrong.

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