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This volume is dedicated to the scholarly virtue of critical engagement.
It is not from our prejudices, passions or habits that we should demand the elements of the definition.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)
5. Is Judaism a Religion, and Why Should We Care? A Reply to Nicola Denzey Lewis 83
Shaul Magid
Are World Religions “Religions”? What about Ancient “Religions”? A Response to Shaul Magid 90
Nicola Denzey Lewis
6. Minding Our Manners in a World without the Gods: A Reply to Kathryn Lofton 97
S. Brent Plate
What I Think About: A Response to S. Brent Plate 105
Kathryn Lofton
7. The Circularity in Defining Religion: A Reply to Shaul Magid 110 Kocku von Stuckrad
Colonialism, Monotheism, and Spirituality: A Response to Kocku von Stuckrad 121
Shaul Magid
8. The Semantic Subject: Religion and the Limits of Language: A Reply to Craig Martin 127
Laurie Zoloth
Religion Is . . . Not Like Science: A Response to Laurie Zoloth 136
Craig Martin
9. Agreed: Religion Is Not a Thing—But Is It an Agent? A Reply to Malory Nye 142
Nicola Denzey Lewis
Religion, Capital, and Other “Things” That Are Not Things: A Response to Nicola Denzey Lewis 151
Malory Nye
10. Is (What Gets Called) Religion an Argument, Discourse, or Ideology? A Reply to Laurie L. Patton 158
Malory Nye
Now What? A Response to Malory Nye 168
Laurie L. Patton
11. Religion Is . . . What It Does: A Reply to Anthony B. Pinn 175 Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Optics Matter: A Response to Jeppe Sinding Jensen 187
Anthony B. Pinn
12. Religion Is an Ever-Adapting Ecosystem of Objects: A Reply to S. Brent Plate
Ann Taves Evolution, Technology, Art: A Response to Ann Taves
S. Brent Plate
13. Scripturalization as Management of Difference: A Reply to Kurtis R. Schaeffer
Vincent L. Wimbush Inside/Outside, Then/Now: A Response to Vincent L. Wimbush
Kurtis R. Schaeffer
14. Critical Voices, Public Debates: A Reply to Kocku von Stuckrad
Laurie L. Patton
Kocku von Stuckrad
15. Let’s Talk about Reading: A Reply to Ann Taves
16. Arguments against the Textualization Regime: A Reply to Vincent L. Wimbush
17.
Preface
The predicament facing early career scholars in the humanities has long been a concern of ours, and so the prior project that we coedited, Religion in 5 Minutes (Equinox, 2017), by design largely involved authors who were near the start of their own careers, either still completing their PhDs or not (hopefully yet) in tenure-track jobs. It was aimed at the wider reading public as well as students in introductory classes (though it was hardly a textbook). Since these readerships continue to strike us as significant and because we are both rather dissatisfied with many of the resources that have been published for such audiences, we decided to coedit another such resource but, this time, decided that inviting senior scholars might be a nice change of pace. Because we also both lament the silos in which our specializations as well as a variety of structures within the field place us (i.e., the way our publishing, grant applications, and conferences are organized, let alone our teaching and hiring decisions), we reasoned that a novel project would invite people who, because of their differing specializations, do not normally converse with one another, asking them to do just that for a change. And given our shared concern for the identity and future of the field, it seemed that proposing they each complete a sentence that simply began “Religion is . . .” might be an interesting place to start—a beginning that provided an opening for someone else in the group to write a critical response, which, in turn, offered the original author a chance to say something in reply.
And so, you now have in front of you the result: a diverse selection of seventeen leading scholars of religion, all of whom work in very different subspecialties, working with each other’s attempts to say what they think religion is—or is not. For some, religion is a thing that does something or perhaps a sentiment that animates action, while for others the sentence might just as well have been “Religion is merely a word and nothing more.” While we certainly have our own understanding of how the field ought to be constituted, a topic on which we have each written in the past, we reasoned that there was something to be gained by inviting as wide a group as we could imagine to engage with one another in a public setting—such as in the pages of a book written for a wide readership—and, as editors, stepping back to
let the contributors get on with it. We thus offer readers a sampling of the field, something to be read akin to how one reads a culture or an ethnography, and then invite them to draw conclusions of their own about the state of the field today. We hope that readers will consider these statements and the responses/replies on not just what religion is but also on what the study of religion is, what scholars of religion do when they carry out their work, and the limits of this field (if, that is, readers conclude that it has any).
You might very well find yourself agreeing with one of more of the following statements or the critical replies they inspired. However, our hope is that you consider the breadth of this modern academic field, as exemplified in this volume, and arrive at a decision of your own on what you think the field ought to be doing and how it ought to look, all based on what it is that the following contributors say they’re doing when they talk about this thing they each call religion. For, as already noted (and expanded upon, a little, in the introduction), we have our own sense about all of this, but felt that our service in this book was not repeating our views yet again but, instead, creating a space for some unexpected pairings from a range of writers in hopes of learning something new about how our peers see the field and the work of others who occupy it.
For this reason the book ends with an appendix that takes its cue from the still-cited appendix of a book that was published over a hundred years ago. Our appendix seeks to provide an even wider range of definitions of religion or statements on what it means to define—some classic and well-known, others contemporary—along with our own brief, critical comments on each. We do this hoping readers will see these as yet more places where critical rejoinders of the reader’s own could be offered in order to explore some of the unexamined assumptions that might be lurking there or throughout the field as a whole.
Aaron W. Hughes and Russell T. McCutcheon
Introduction
Aaron W. Hughes and Russell T. McCutcheon
In the well-known and once widely cited appendix to his 1912 book, A Psychological Study of Religion, James Leuba (1912: 339–63) provides his reader with forty-eight definitions of “religion,” which he subsequently divides into three categories: the intellectualist, the affectivistic, and the voluntaristic. He trusts that the perusal of these definitions “will not bewilder the reader, but that he [or she] will see in them a splendid illustration both of the versatility and the one-sidedness of the human mind in the description of a very complex yet unitary manifestation of life” (339). The first definition offered is that of F. Max Müller (credited by many with establishing this intellectual field over a hundred years ago), from his 1873 Introduction to the Science of Religion (not insignificantly, perhaps, dedicated to the American essayist, poet, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson). His definition begins with the statement “Religion is a mental faculty or disposition, which, independent of, nay in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and under varying degrees.” Whether or not we agree with Müller, and whether or not we agree with Leuba’s particular taxonomy or types of definitions, the locution “religion is . . .” has long resided at the heart of our collective enterprise, setting the table for our contributors. The nonconfessional, academic field of religious studies (as it is often called, though it goes by other names as well, including the history of religions and comparative religion, even the science of religion) that has developed since those early introductory essays were published ostensibly spends a lot of time with “religion” and its attendant adjective and the various nouns it usually qualifies. We therefore study not only religions, in the plural, and the supposed thing that animates them (religion in the singular) but also religious experiences, religious texts, religious rituals, religious institutions, and so on. A plethora of academic articles and books are written annually about all of these topics, but, at least in our experience as their readers, said works
Aaron W. Hughes and Russell T. McCutcheon, Introduction In: What Is Religion? Debating the Academic Study of Religion
rarely focus on what makes something a “religion.” That is, they often fail to offer an explicit definition and, in our opinion, often just use some commonsense understanding that their authors assume to be shared by their readers or which the author happened to grow up hearing and therefore using, whether conscious of this habit or not. What is more, many of these studies tend to focus on the local or the specific (these particular Hindus here and now, or those specific Muslims then and there), rarely entertaining what religion may or may not be on a much larger scale—and thus never confronting just why the writer was able to group all those people called Hindus together, much less mention them so naturally in the same sentence as people called Muslims, Confucians, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Daoists, etc., etc. After all, if something is designated as a religious text here and then something else has that same attribute there, must they not have something in common? In fact, so problematic is the term as a perceived cross-cultural phenomenon that some scholars have even called for us to cease and desist from its deployment altogether. Instead, they advise that, regardless whether the people we study call themselves or the things they do religious, scholars should dissolve those things into far wider notions of culture, ideology, or worldview, thereby seeing those things formerly known as religion or religious as but another routine instance of ideology, for example.
What we hope is becoming evident is that just what “religion is” is now a highly contentious topic among scholars, not to mention the public at large. It is not difficult to find people in the U.S. or Europe, for instance, claiming that mandating the display in public government buildings of the motto “In God We Trust” or Christian crucifixes is not religious but a sign of this other thing they call heritage—thereby ensuring, or so they argue, that such mandates are constitutional and therefore legal. But just what is going on behind the scenes during these moments when something is said to be religious (or not)? Who gets to decide what makes something religious or a religion, or not? What are the discourses and the assumptions that produce religion as an item to be discussed, much less carried out or performed? Since we maintain that these assumptions and these discourses do not fall from heaven, and are thus not self-evident or obvious, religion as a concept ought to be defined— and defined not just explicitly but with some precision, at least if scholars are using the term. In what follows, then, leading scholars of religion have been invited to provide their definitions in a more explicit manner than perhaps is usual, and to consider each other’s definitions, all in an attempt to nudge along a particular conversation among them. While one certainly may not
agree with all of their terms or assumptions and conclusions, taken together readers will be able to gauge the state of the field at the current moment. But what, you may be asking at this point, is religion to us, the editors? As our dearly departed colleague Jonathan Z. Smith remarked in his 1998 essay “Religion, Religions, Religious,” it would seem that Leuba was both correct and incorrect in his desire for definitions of religion. According to Smith,
It was once a tactic of students of religion to cite the appendix of James H. Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion (1912), which lists more than fifty definitions of religion, to demonstrate that “the effort clearly to define religion in short compass is a hopeless task” (King 1954). Not at all! The moral of Leuba is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways. Besides, Leuba goes on to classify and evaluate his list of definitions. “Religion” is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define. It is a second-order generic concept that plays the same role in establishing a disciplinary horizon that a concept such as “language” plays in linguistics or “culture” plays in anthropology. There can be no disciplined study of religion without such a horizon. (281–282)
Smith here reminds us, as he so poignantly did throughout his career, that there is nothing special about the category “religion.” If anything, it is a term that, though often imprecise, defines our area of study. This should be obvious to all, but alas, it is not. Not to be undone, the American Academy of Religion (AAR; the largest U.S. professional association for scholars who study religion) has also gotten into the game of defining religion. According to their website,
Because it crosses so many different boundaries in human experience, religion is notoriously difficult to define. Many attempts have been made, however, and while every theory has its limitations, each perspective contributes to our understanding of this complex phenomenon. . . . The variety of approaches in the attempt to define religion can be imposing and sometimes frustrating. Discussion about widely differing approaches to the subject matter, however, gives the study of religion its vitality, and most students and scholars in the field appreciate its many crosscurrents.1
1 AAR, “What Is Religion?,” accessed July 1, 2019, http://studyreligion.org/what/index.html
Rather than follow the lead of our national guild—which somehow knows religion to be more complex than the various attempts to define it, an intuition that we find to be an unscholarly basis for our work—we maintain, following Smith, that religion is nothing more (nor less) than an imagined category that people use (often quite effectively, of course) when talking about, and thereby making sense of, their situations in the world. There are therefore no “religions” in the world, we would further claim, other than those movements, institutions, claims, and practices that are classified as such by those using the category at specific moments for specific effect—whether that means scholars going about their studies or the people scholars may study who are themselves going about their daily business. That not everyone in the world even uses this Latin-derived term, or some local variant or analogue, when talking about their world is something that we need to keep in mind as well. Claims about “the Hindu religion,” for instance, may tell us far more about the observer making such a claim than the people so named by an observer who makes sense of an unfamiliar situation by means of a word in their vocabulary.
But this view is not necessarily shared by our contributors, and that is by design. A field does not make advances by means of backslapping conversations among people who already agree with one another. Instead, we tend to think fields of study grow at points of disagreement and debate. That is how we come across assumptions we never knew we had, inconsistencies we had failed to see, and where we identify implications we had never thought of before. So what follows is, we trust, a nonconventional volume inasmuch as the contributors all agreed to do some work, in public, at these very sites of difference and possible disagreement. Rather than begin with the premise, à la AAR, that religion is something out there waiting to be defined, we decided to ask our contributors to define at the very outset what they consider “religion” to be, to the best of their abilities, taking “Religion is . . .” as their shared prompt.
The initial definitions that were offered by each of our contributors serve as a point of entry into thinking about the study of religion as practiced or made possible by that particular definition (or in spite of it). In this, each person who offered a definition of religion subsequently was invited to comment on and respond to that of another scholar included in the volume. To this end, we have asked all of our contributors to play three roles in this book:
1. Offer their own definitive “Religion is . . .” sentence/paragraph that succinctly but directly conveys their thoughts on the substance, origin, or function/effects of religion that warrant scholarly study today.
2. Respond to the “Religion is . . .” sentence/paragraph of one of the other contributors to the volume in a detailed and substantive essay/commentary that uses their colleague’s opening sentence/paragraph as the springboard into a larger discussion of that position’s history/context and, in the respondent’s view, its merits, limits, or future possibilities.
3. Reply to a respondent’s critical commentary on their own “Religion is . . .” sentence/paragraph, allowing readers to eavesdrop on the scholarly back-and-forth that characterizes debate in the modern field.
The results, we trust, provide a refreshing take on religion as these scholars actively engage with one another in a set of textual conversations that reveal some of the tensions, fissures, and possibilities of religious studies at what we think to be an important moment in the field’s history. While we certainly do not mean for these definitions, or the conversations they produce, let alone the list of contributors, to be read as definitive, we do hope that the variety of scholars and viewpoints in the following pages will spur others to think more broadly and, yes, more critically (with precision, as we say) about the work that this term “religion” is doing as they use it in their own studies or as they make what seems to be the most casual or self-evident claims about their world—i.e., the things that populate their world and the ranked relationships into which we place them by calling something a this or a that.
References
King, Winston L. (1954). Introduction to Religion. New York: Harper and Row.
Leuba, James H. (1912). A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origins, Function, and Future. New York: The MacmillanMillan Company.
Müller, F. Max (1873). Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution with Two Essays on False Analogies and the Philosophy of Mythology London: Longmans, Green and Co.
Smith, Jonathan Z. (1998). “Religion, Religions, Religious.,” iIn Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 269–284. (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
“Religion Is . . .” Statements
Although the definition to which an author responds opens each of their responses, the statements that provide the basis for this volume are provided here, in alphabetical order of their author’s surname—which is also the order in which these statements are addressed in the volume.
1. Susan E. Henking
Religion is a gunshot; a cold shower; Freudian slippers; cotton candy; sea glass; haiku; wind. . . . Religion—“religion”—is our centrally contested concept, wicked problem, fractal joining and dividing us. Like its twin “secular,” “religion” is a flight of imagination (and power) that is our hope and our doom. Secular is my flight of imagination (and power), hope and doom, binding me to religion personally, professionally, perversely. Religion is a term of art—used differently in ordinary language, legalese, by IRS and UN—specialist use emerges from and (dis)appears into. . . . Religion is arrived at—and used—in the contest of conversation, the dissensus that is academia. Our context is our definition. Religion is a tool we use to categorize (invidiously or not), thus to think and act: to ask new questions, more fully understand people, obscure and reveal, bend the arc of history toward. . . . Religion is what the academic study of religion studies. It is our employer. Religion is parapraxis, catharsis, anxiety: nesting doll of footnotes, patrilineage. The public importance of our understandings requires: taking a stand—holding intellectual and ethical commitments tightly and loosely enough to challenge and be challenged; moving beyond academic fundamentalism, analysis paralysis, relativism; refusing the ivory tower and remembering our task: while baffled and uncertain, being clear in our time that making sense of religion and “religion” is something we ought to do “as if our lives depend upon it” (citing Adrienne Rich). Because they do. . . . Who are we?
2. Jeppe Sinding Jensen
Religion is a word used to denote a rather fuzzy set of conceptualizations and epistemic generalizations about a range of human activities. For practical purposes, a stipulative “full-coverage” generalization (“definition”) might run like this: “Semantic and cognitive networks comprising ideas, behaviours and institutions in relation to counter-intuitive superhuman agents, objects and posits” (Jensen 2014: 7–8). This generalization is intended to equally cover e-religion and i-religion. The first includes all that is external, such as behaviors, artifacts, texts, and other externalizations and materializations of religiously guided intentionality. The second characterizes all the internal processes, that is, “religion-in-the-mind,” such as intentionality, beliefs, emotions, values, and conations related to the semantic and cognitive networks. Typical elements are explanations of the origins (cosmogony) and classifications of what makes up the world (cosmology); ideas about matters, objects, and agents that are sacred, ultimate, and inviolable; beliefs in superhuman agents; special powers and knowledge that such agents have and that humans may gain access to; beliefs concerning human fate and life after death; ritual actions of various kinds (from silent prayer to bloody sacrifice) that ensure the communication with the sacred or “other world” in bidirectional causality, or “the-world-as-wished-for”; institutions setting the limits and conditions for such communication and containing rules for human conduct in systems of purity, hierarchy, and group relations; as well as in ethics and morality. All that in turn depends on reproduction of social and associative learning patterns, practices, and maintenance by imitation and rule-following (“cloning minds”).
3. Martin Kavka
Religion is an authorizing system—for authorizing certain persons, ideas, and practices. I hesitate to say much more than this. But this minimal definition entails two corollaries. In the study of religion, we find claims to authority. They can function in many ways: as attempts to gain authority for oneself or one’s group, to cut off others’ authority at the knees, and/or to downplay (or maximize) the threat of one’s own difference. But whatever these claims are,
the fact that they exist makes them important data for scholars . . . if and only if they remember that there are no claims without claimers, persons who are historically situated and otherwise finite, and who make their claims out of various interests. Claimers are not equivalent to oracles. Some claims to authority are better than others. They can have a better handle on history, or they can have a more fine-grained take on the operation of various cultural processes of ideological circulation. Yet it is also the case that some claims are better than others because they are more justifiable, because they occur in better arguments. Because the claims to authority that we find in the study of religion often express that authority in terms of a chain of reasoning that presents itself as normatively better, scholars of religion can assess whether those chains of reasoning are good or bad. For this reason, the study of religion will never be able to cease to grapple with the normative dimension of human existence.
4. Anne Koch
Religion is is already a wrong start. People create a variety of objects depending on the tasks they have to accomplish. In this philosophical pragmatism and evolutionary view of cultural phenomena and theoretical issues, the religion discourse is seen to answer questions and solve problems, or at least to rise to challenges. These questions and challenges give the spectrum of meanings and performances religion colligates with at specific times, groups, and local places. Therefore, “religion” is always quite another matter, as it depends on historical framings and is not the singularization of a preexisting blueprint. One consequence of this is that the same practices can be called religious in one but not in another context (which is why indeed they are not the “same” practices, except for a pointless comparison). So the question is not about the sameness or the regularly adduced family resemblance (which does not solve anything as it derives features from the dominant use) but about what is realized and asserted with “religion” claims, institution building, etc. Treating religion from a theory of science perspective, I am a maximalist in the sense of denying even the benefit of definitions like “belief in supernatural beings,” as they are at best a historical pooling of meaning. Definitions also lead to the misunderstanding that object fields of academic disciplines are traced out by the theoretical practice of defining. The really interesting questions are far from explained, such as why, first of all, tasks are perceived of as tasks
and, second, solved in a way that some call religious. So academically calling something “religion/religions/religious” (Smith) is misleading insofar as it creates the impression of having said anything with that labeling, which in truth one has not.
5. Nicola Denzey Lewis
Religion is slippery, soluble, subjective. Like beauty, it lies in the eye of the beholder. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. As a discipline, it is famously parasitic. We draw on anything, any tools, to allow us to see this thing—the contours of which we ourselves draw. As a phenomenon, the most thoughtful of us declare that there is no such thing. What makes an action “religious” rather than secular? What a “ritual” and not a repeated behavior—as Freud long ago wrote, an obsessive compulsion? As a historian of ancient religion, I necessarily engage in the process of defining the boundaries of my field. Religion in Roman antiquity—but not all religion at all times—orients itself around a series of attitudes and behaviors toward powers, energies, and beings deemed to be higher and more powerful. My challenge is to consider if “religion” transcends cultures and times, places and the infinitely complicated minds and hearts of people. Is there only one thing, one universal “religion is . . .” that unites “us” and “them”? This endeavor itself provokes a question: What violence might a universalizing definition and a universalizing approach bring, should we try to answer what “religion is” with a diachronic eye? Or, by contrast, does a universalizing approach help to bring the past closer? Does it explain, or does it obfuscate? Can any understanding of religion in the past proceed without our own modern projections and idealizations? Do we look to the past and see only ourselves in a mirror darkly—so darkly that we do not even recognize our own features and mistake them for someone else entirely? That is my concern, and my task, as I work to grasp this slipperiness and turn it into words.
6. Kathryn Lofton
Religion is a manner of classifying, symbolizing, or schematizing, usually intended to explain the arrangement or working of a systematic whole.
7. Shaul Magid
Religion is often its own worst enemy. While it is associated with the potential to transcend boundaries of tribe, language, and place, religion often becomes that which solidifies borders of separation, reifying difference. Religion serves as one of the most potent collective exemplars of transtribal, translinguistic, and deterritorialized orderings of society. Yet it is also largely an imperialistic project, particular to the modern West. Religion often claims to serve as a genealogical bridge connecting origin with telos, beginning with purpose. Yet it is a distinctively modern framework through which individuals and communities connect themselves to the past and envision a future. Religion distinguishes itself from “spirituality” in that, while the latter is often singular, and quietist, the former often contains social formations meant to solidify collectivity (i.e., ritual) and to construct a hierarchical message of preference (i.e., election) and soteriological vision of the future (i.e., redemption). It often functions, however, to separate those within from those without while at the same time offering a universal vision of a future where divisions collapse in ways that prove its claims about itself. While God often functions as part of, sometimes the apex of, religion, God’s place in religion often serves as a placeholder for an indecipherable and undetermined (and undeterminable) telos. Religion is thus an expression of unknowing often veiled by the guise of the unknowable.
8. Craig Martin
Religion is a noun subject to a great deal of semantic drift. Across the literature in the humanities and social sciences—and no less so in the field of religious studies itself—the word is defined in a wide variety of competing and sometimes mutually exclusive ways: worldviews, matters of ultimate concern, forms of culture related to the supernatural, etc., that is, if it’s defined at all. All too often, instead of providing a definition, authors write as if the included referents were self-evident: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and a few other forms of culture comparable in some way to these “big five.” More troubling is the fact that most texts that begin with a narrow definition slip from that definition to the term’s commonsense referents: textbooks that define religion as a belief in the supernatural may discuss Hinduism but will ignore Americans’ faith in the invisible hand of
the market; cognitive science studies that focus on minimally counterintuitive beings may include Jesus but fail to consider the now ubiquitous cast of characters from the Disney or Marvel canons. In a recent metastudy about whether religious people are more dogmatic than agnostics and atheists, the authors don’t bother to operationalize religion at all but simply draw from existing studies that demarcate religion using “belief scales that assessed various themes related to religiosity (e.g., belief in God and/or the importance of church) . . . [and] frequency of religious behaviors (e.g., church attendance, prayer), participation in religious organizations, and membership in denominations” (Zuckerman, Silberman and Hall 2013: 328) A tautology: people are religious when they’re religious. In any case, the result is that the authors draw conclusions about religion in one sense (apparently church-going Christians) but write as if those conclusions applied to religion in general, including a wide variety of referents completely unrelated to the one with which they began—as if dogmatic church-going Christians were representative of ancient worshipers of Zoroaster. The referent of the word “religion” is subject to a level of semantic drift so promiscuous that it seems clear “the” object of the study of religion is singular only by virtue of a collective willful ignorance.
9. Malory Nye
Religion is not a thing. There is no such thing as “religion,” since “it” is not an it. Religion is not an object that exists beyond human language and discourse. Religion is a word used by English-language speakers to describe what some humans think about and do. By describing, the word also defines and proscribes, and thus builds assumptions about the world that are not neutral or natural. Indeed, like all other categories, it is political: the term creates and enforces a certain social order, which is experienced as a reality. It is a formation and embodiment of power that exists only within the operation of that power. And so “religion” is a term that has emerged, and has particular meanings in the contemporary world, because of colonial power—within the British Empire and English-speaking North America. Contemporary understandings of religion are the legacies of such historical inequalities. There would be no religion (as we know it) without colonialism. Thus religion is like race, gender, sexuality, and other categories: the term relies on assumptions of a reality, which are experienced as real. There is no such
thing as race apart from how race and racialized differences are constructed (and lived) as a reality within the politics of whiteness. Likewise for religion. Conceptualizations of religion are racialized, they are gendered, they are sexualized, and they are a way of talking about and acting within and onto bodies.
10. Laurie L. Patton
Religion is an ongoing social and historical argument about ultimate value. The word “argument” forces us to ask who the interlocutors are in any given religious tradition at particular moments in its history. Arguments about ultimate value always occur in dialogue or contention with other perspectives, even if they are not named. One must take into account the people and institutions around religion, both within and beyond its self-described boundaries, who are themselves challenging or supporting it. Religion may be codified by deities, symbols, creeds, texts, rituals, philosophical perspectives, and foundational narratives, but not all of these elements necessarily occur simultaneously, nor are they all essential for the social argument to continue in history. These elements can also be forms of argumentation in their own right. They can give clues to what is at stake and who the other interlocutors are in any given assertion about ultimate value. Those who make these arguments usually form a community in which their perspectives are understood to be self-evidently true and morally binding. (These qualities distinguish religion from philosophy, which allows the disconfirmation of a central argument and may or may not be morally binding.) Those who are trained in and skilled at making social arguments and reassert them regularly are understood to be authorities. Travel into and out of the community is usually ritualized in some fashion, and while boundaries can be more and less porous for travelers, their movement is marked by those in authority.
11. Anthony B. Pinn
Religion is a technology. Within the study of African American religion, which is my primary area of exploration, religion is perceived typically as a dynamic set of experiences informed by an epistemology of difference. That is to say, religion points to a “something” constituted by a unique knowledge and shaped by an accompanying range of commitments and practices. All
this “stuff” of religion points humans toward more productive and affirming private and public relations described as “liberated,” “free,” “transformed,” and so on. While providing psycho-ethical responses to socially coded conditions of collective life (e.g., racism, sexism, classism) framed by a narrative of cosmic aid, such an understanding of religion fails to identify fully the human quality of religion and misnames ethics “religion.” Instead, I posit that religion isn’t sui generis, nor is it even defined by the content of more ordinary modalities of historically situated experience. Rather, religion is a technology or strategy (with a nod in the direction of Foucault and Camus). Religion as a technology or strategy isn’t “charged” in any particular way. Hence, human experience may have a connection to desire for meaning, but religion doesn’t contain the answer to that struggle for meaning, nor does it support the assumption that meaning is necessary or achievable.
12. S. Brent Plate
“Religion” is a heuristic term that is most useful when referring to a network of worldmaking technologies that emerge within ever-adapting ecosystems of objects, including cultural products, the natural world, and human bodies. Chief among these religious technologies are the apparatuses humans use in the construction of myths, rituals, beliefs, symbols, gods, and spirits, as they are enacted and engaged in socially and aesthetically special spaces and times. Religious technologies are principally mediated by the senses (including interoception, proprioception, and the five external senses) and function to extend the human subject into its world, thereby transcending and often dissolving the self, just as the constructed worlds reach into sensing human bodies and modify them, compelling them to adapt behaviors to the larger collective. Through these processes, enchanting worlds are created and lived within, offering belonging, identity, and a sense of social and supernatural order, while rupturing or displacing other worlds that may operate with competing technologies.
13.
Kurtis R. Schaeffer
Religion is . . . Where to start? 1927? Sure. Religion is that feeling when the world drops out beneath your feet, nothing left but sky, sound, ocean,
