On Making a Shift in the Study of Religion and Other Essays

Russell T. McCutcheon

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110721867
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although many would today argue that the onetime dominance of the phenomenology of religion has receded, and with it the traditional approach to studying religion as a unique and deeply-felt experience that defies explanation, the essays collected here take quite the opposite stand: that this approach has merely been re-branded and continues to characterize much work being done in the field today. Offering a different way forward—one that is based on experiences gained by the members of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, a program that has successfully reinvented itself over the past 20 years—the book includes a variety of practical suggestions for how members of Religious Studies departments can revise their approach to studying and teaching about religion. Seeing religion instead as mundane but always exemplary of basic social elements found all across cultures, the volume argues that the way forward for this field lies not in the specialness of its object of study but, instead, the fact that thinking and acting as if something is special is itself an ordinary aspect of history and culture. Making just this shift helps the scholar of religion to contribute to wide, interdisciplinary conversations all across the Humanities and Social Sciences, demonstrating the practical relevance of their work.

Part I Current State

1 The Enduring Presence of Our Pre-Critical Past

Note: My thanks to Aaron Hughes and Craig Martin for their feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter.

No need to remember when

‘Cause everything old is new again

– “Everything Old is New Again” by Paul Allen and Carole Bayer Sager (1974)

When invited to deliver a paper to the 2019 meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR) on the topic of the history of the field, I accepted, though I admit to doing so with some small degree of trepidation. I felt the need to say something a little different from what I’ve already put into print, on a variety of past occasions, concerning problems found in the history of the study of religion—a history that may seem rather distant to us now, given that it was situated in the midst of nineteenth-century European colonialism (see, for example, McCutcheon 2000) or, more recently, in the Cold War politics of two generations ago (McCutcheon 2004). For, as those two citations make evident, I have already discussed the practical implications (both inside and outside of the academy) of how prior scholars approached the study of religion—approaches that were, in the earliest years, grouped together and called either comparative religion or the science of religion. To state it simply, my argument has been that, given my understanding of what it means to study human beings from within the modern research university, some of those approaches are more fitting than others. In fact, as I’ve also argued, some of these approaches actually undermine the field, at least as I understand it to be properly constituted, despite being offered by their supporters as but one more viable alternative; for I contest the position that holds that virtually any use of the word “religion” in a post-secondary setting, or as part of a piece of research, qualifies as but another instance of the so-called big tent that some think we all inhabit.¹ As with how I discuss definitions in my own introductory classes, then, when it comes to an academic pursuit I would argue that what some now see as the admirable desire to include as much as possible actually hampers the field; instead, when it comes to scholarship, the more precision, the better.²

So, having made plenty of such claims in the past about all of this, I felt that this occasion presented an opportunity to say something new … ; recollecting both Roland Barthes’ views on authorship and that strategically brief piece that I’ve often used in classes, “Borges and I” (1999, 324), I could say that, qua scriptor, I certainly know how to write like the author that shares my name, so this—or so I reasoned—might be an ideal moment to go against the grain a bit, to offer something a little unexpected, perhaps in hopes that those who, at least as I see it, stereotype my work as a means to dismiss it, might be surprised, just a little. For along with that surprise there might be a temptation actually to read it for a change and not, as I’ve seen on many past occasions, assume that a little bit of Manufacturing Religion or a chapter or two from Critics Not Caretakers (both containing work from more than twenty years ago or more; in fact, the former contains work almost thirty years old), told them all they needed to know about my work.³ But, sadly, despite this earnest desire, I’ve decided that I see little new to say when I look again over the work that helped to establish our field but, more importantly, the work that now characterizes large segments of our field, much of it coming from a newer generation of scholars. In both cases, I find myself returning to the same old unresolved themes, since many of the problems that I still find with past practices and the criticisms that I have offered on other occasions strike me as being just as relevant today, when applied to the work that some consider to be at the field’s cutting edge.

And so, because it seems to me that the old problems endure, I feel that I have no choice but to use this opportunity to repeat—well, let’s just say reinforce, since it seems to avoid the idea of redundancy—what I have said in the past,⁴ though exemplifying the recurring challenges of the field at sites that I may not have previously discussed in print. Despite the fact that this chapter first appeared as a pre-distributed discussion paper on a panel devoted to the history of the field (followed by responses from James Edmonds, D. Jamil Grimes, Drew Durdin, and Rebekka King), it is not about the past at all (but, come to think of it, when is the past ever about the past?)⁵; for despite a wide variety of contemporary writers, notably some who now identify as post-critical or post-theoretical,⁶ claiming to have left flawed earlier practices and assumptions behind—after all, who even reads Eliade anymore, one might justifiably ask⁷—the practices and assumptions that continue to drive the field today are, I argue, little different from those that did decades ago.

Before continuing, I should distinguish what I am about to argue from the recent co-written work of two mentors of mine, both from the academic generation prior to my own and both among NAASR’s founders: Donald Wiebe and Luther H. Martin. In a 2012 article published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, they contend that “a history of the development of religious studies as a scientific enterprise in the modern university is an incoherent contradiction that reveals tensions between putative claims to academic status and the actual reality of continuing infiltrations of extra-scientific agendas into the field” (2012, 591).

On this score I differ little from them, though I would add some qualifications. Based on early modern intellectual (and, I would add, political) developments in Europe, a way of conceptualizing and talking about this thing commonly designated by some (but not all—a crucial point) as religion was devised and, over the coming centuries, refined and implemented in universities, as a way to generate knowledge about (more likely than not, other) people, both at home and abroad, as well as in constitutions and laws by governments, as a way to organize and govern people, until we arrive at today. Now, at least as practiced in the university of modern nation-states, the academic study of religion is seen as somehow different from studies meant to prepare oneself for a professional role as a ritual specialist or so-called religious functionary. Moreover, also in agreement with Wiebe and Martin, this distinction between what an earlier generation (I think here of Ninian Smart, among others) might have characterized as the study of and the practice of has continually been under attack by those who see such compartmentalization, as they might call it, as inhibiting either the legitimacy or the spread of their interest in the carrying out these practices (a.k.a. undermining the identity and social implications that come from membership within groups that scholars who make this distinction study as nothing more or less than another curious instance of human behavior). Many members of the current generation of scholars proclaim that what was once called the insider/outsider problem⁸ or, before that, the theology/religious studies debate is now passé—yet they find themselves still divided between those elaborating and defending the study of/practice of distinction as opposed to those criticizing such work in an effort to erase what they see as an artificially imposed and thus detrimental difference.⁹

However, at least one place where I differ (as might already be evident from some of the above qualifications) concerns what Kocku von Stuckrad, in a reply to Martin and Wiebe’s article, rightly (I would argue) identified as a “naïve image of the natural sciences that most historians of science would deconstruct today” (2012, 61).¹⁰ Based upon this view, they not only presume that it ought to be inevitable that a rational discourse on religion develops (if not for certain cognitive proclivities, as argued in their 2012 article) but then come to lament their career-long efforts to make it so—a “false and unshakeable delusion” to which they provocatively confess in the above-cited article. While I’ve argued at length concerning the differences between my own approach and that of at least Wiebe (see McCutcheon 2006),¹¹ this admission, on their part, highlights a key difference that I had previously not considered: what I’ll characterize as my own far more pragmatic view of academic intervention and change.¹² For while Wiebe and Martin have confessed to being deluded when they reflect back on their optimism for the development of a truly scientific study of religion, I am instead content in the knowledge that a critical study of religion (a term Daniel Dubuisson, among others, has recently adopted for a specific brand of scholarship on religion, in opposition to what he terms religionists) will never happen—at least never happen en masse as opposed to being an occurrence in more or less isolated but, in my assessment, intellectually vibrant and, hopefully, influential pockets of the field.¹³ For if my analysis of the discourse on religion is persuasive¹⁴—an analysis that understands the classification of just some or discrete elements of the human as religious, in distinction from other elements (which are termed social, cultural, political, ethnic, secular, etc.), as having the effect of arranging and thereby privileging certain aspects of otherwise mundane daily life, in the service of a variety of practical social interests and situations—and, what’s more, if the people who continue to elect to become scholars of religion largely come from groups for whom this designation is but a commonsense term in their inherited folk lexicons (making it a way that they too, despite being scholars, arrange and thereby privilege certain aspects of their otherwise mundane daily lives, in the service of their own specific practical social interests and situations), then how could we expect the academic study of religion to be anything other than what it has generally become: a largely normative exercise in the service of reproducing specific understandings of religion so as to normalize specific ways of arranging social actors and thus social life, to the benefit of just some aspects within society? For that’s just how the discourse on religion functions—whether used by scholars or anyone else, I maintain. (And by normative I mean far more than the old religious studies versus theology framing but, instead, imply the link between the study of religion as a disciplinary practice, and large scale socially formative exercises aiming to shape the nation in specific ways.) From the well-documented politically liberal and inter-religious dialog model that informs much of the long-standing world religions genre (both the courses and their textbooks; more on this below) to more recent efforts to establish and enhance so-called religious literacy standards throughout society (thereby standardizing and policing an authorized discourse on religion of benefit to certain understandings of the nation; more on this below as well), the academic pursuit known as the study of religion, at least as practiced by many today, in large part constitutes an effort to reproduce and entrench one among many specific ways of using the “religion” category, in the service of a practical political program. For while it would be rare to find a scholar of religion today agreeing that this word “religion” names, say, inferior attempts to mimic the saving grace and love of Jesus as found in Christianity (a use of the term religion that is easily found today),¹⁵ it is not difficult to find scholars who define religion in such a way as to name the presumed non-empirical, essential, and thus universal core of human nature that is, of course, aligned with rather specific social and political goals (yet another use of this word “religion,” but one that happens to be in direct contest with the one just identified). While the sort of world that results from the latter strategy may be one in which I would prefer to live, where I would prefer to shop, go to work, and own a house—a point that we cannot overlook, to be sure—the question is whether an approach to the field that is driven by such preferences or seeks to realize them in practice, no matter how widely they are shared, best exemplifies what an academic pursuit ought to be or ought to be designed to accomplish. For al...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Sources
• Introduction
• Part I Current State
• Part II Critical Shift
• Part III Institutional Implications
• Afterword: Five Examples
• Index