Critical Religion Reader

Preface

In 2018 I contacted three brilliant academics, the editors of this volume, and asked them to select and edit a collection of 1000 word essays that had been published on the Critical Religion Association (CRA) website. They had written some of the best of these themselves. (Though this website is strongly associated with the University of Stirling and its Religion subject area, it is in fact off-campus). These three have produced this Reader. I am grateful to these excellent scholars - Dr Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan (Raji), Dr Cameron Montgomery and Dr Melanie Barbato - for finding the time and energy to achieve this, when all three have their own busy academic and personal lives to lead in the precarious conditions of the times.

I want to stress that, though I initiated this Reader, I stayed completely out of the selection and editing process. This was done solely by Raji, Melanie and Cameron. This is their publication.

We all live in different countries and on different continents. I am in Australia; Cameron is in Canada; Melanie is in Germany; and Raji is in Japan. We are all in different time zones. We are all trying to scratch a living in the precarious conditions of global capitalism. And we are all trying to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the global pandemic of covid-19.

I want – briefly - to give a bit of background here so our readers can understand the conditions that gave rise to this volume, and to the Critical Religion Association (CRA) website in the first place. It was our Stirling colleague Michael Marten who set up the CRA website. And though several people shared the work of editing, Raji - Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan - did as much and perhaps more than most to assist Michael.  I thought that the ideal person to coordinate the task of compiling and editing this book was Raji. Raji wrote her PhD thesis at Stirling, jointly supervised by myself and Michael (2009-2014). Raji was a major editorial contributor to the critical religion webpage set up by Michael while she was simultaneously researching and writing her PhD, as well as doing teaching and lecturing duties for the religion subject area.

Melanie Barbato was one of our most brilliant undergraduates at the University of Stirling in my memory. She was an outstanding member of an exceptionally talented cohort of students at that time. In addition to her excellent writing and intelligent contributions to our seminars, Melanie was active with other students in helping to organise a series of student group workshops in Critical Religion. Since leaving Stirling she went on to a doctorate in Indology and Religious Studies from LMU Munich, and then to publish her monograph on Jaina philosophy.

Cameron Montgomery’s PhD was supervised by Professor Naomi Goldenberg at the University of Ottawa. It was therefore by way of Naomi that Cameron became interested in critical religion. Naomi has long been one of the most prominent theorists and activists contributing to critical religion, as well as a good friend to the department at Stirling and to me personally. To have both Naomi and her multi-talented student Cameron contributing to critical religion strengthens the visibility and the plausibility of the enterprise. It was on a visit to Ottawa that I first met Cameron, and we met again later with Naomi on a train journey between Uppsala and Lund in 2014. We had been with 40 or 50 colleagues at the Critical Religion conference at Uppsala, and were on our way to Lund University to give a public lecture there. Cameron has many creative talents in addition to her academic work. It is Cameron’s own publishing company Studio Dreamshare Press that is producing this Reader.

Critical Religion, understood as the critical study of ‘religion’ and related categories, was adopted early as the symbol and focus for the work of the religion subject area at Stirling University, and this became more visible when Michael joined us at Stirling in 2008 and the establishment of the CRA website. There were four of us full-time in religion by this time  – Alison Jasper, Andrew Hass, Michael and myself. Michael Marten set up and edited the webpage with imagination and technical skill, as well as carrying the normal heavy teaching load and contributing significantly to the development of our courses. The CRA website replaced an earlier website, the Critical Religion Category Network (CRCN), which I had set up in around 2004 with the help of a visiting American student. This was around the time of the first critical religion conference, Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, which took place at Stirling in 2003. That conference generated the essays collected in a book edited by myself and published by Equinox in 2007 under the title Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations. However, the smart American student who set it up for me had to return to the USA, and my own lack of skills in using webpage software meant that the CRCN webpage never got much off the ground. When Michael arrived, he improved things greatly with the CRA website. The website is still live - even though Michael, Alison and I have all retired. The current caretaker is Dr Bashir Saade, who is lecturer in Religion and Politics at Stirling.

There were many other colleagues, friends and former students who contributed to the religion subject area at Stirling, and I confine myself to those who have contributed essays to this volume, selected by the three editors. Dr Fiona Darroch, Dr Katja Neumann, Dr Paige Medlock, and Dr Francis Stewart, all did their PhD’s at Stirling, and all contributed greatly to our diverse subject area, as teachers, course developers, essay markers, webpage editors, and as valued colleagues generally. The diversity of their special interests is a good sign of the relevance of critical religion to many different topics.

Three of the contributors to this volume – Dr Per-Erik Nilsson (Pelle), Dr Mitsutoshi Horii (Mitsu), and Dr Alex Henley, have made substantial contributions to critical religion. Pelle, Mitsu and Alex are significant theorists in their own right. They all pay close attention to the religion-secular binary operations in distinct and specific contexts: Pelle’s work on the controversies over Muslim dress codes in France; Alex’s work on Islam in Lebanon; and Mitsu’s work on the invention of religion and politics in Japan. They are all concerned with cognitive imperialism and the legacy of colonial and neo-colonial hegemony. They have been regular contributors to critical religion for years, and they have made substantial theoretical contributions in their own publications, and through their presence at critical religion seminars, workshops, and conferences. Alex has also been running a critical religion series of invited guest speakers at Oxford.

Finally I pay tribute to Dr Brian Nail and Dr Carolina Ivanescu, and express our gratitude to them for their effective contributions. Carolina’s work with Tibetan diaspora and refugees and the practice of self-immolation, and Brian’s exposure of faith in the myth of self-regulating markets held by the experts who run the Federal Reserve Bank, are very interesting topics in themselves, and act to further destabilise the discourse on religion and religions and their supposed essential difference from secular practices.

On a day to day basis, until the end of 2015, it was Alison, Andrew, Michael and I who formed the core subject area group at Stirling. We took all decisions on a collective, democratic basis. We each had and have our own area of expertise, and we did not necessarily always agree what critical religion is or ought to be. Inter-disciplinarity is not merely close to our heart as a nice sentiment, as Andrew Hass has pointed out in his piece here What is a University?. Inter-disciplinarity is inescapable for critical religion. The category ‘religion’ is uncritically reproduced throughout the academy, not only in religious studies. The very idea of a secular university requires the idea of religion by mutual exclusion. Historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and just about everyone else in the Humanities and Social Sciences deploy the term ‘religion’ as though it is a fixed, unitary sign that refers to some self-evident feature of the world. In this sense it is a transcendental illusion, with its endlessly contested meaning and history concealed beneath an appearance of stability and coherence. But then almost exactly the same can be said about its parasitic other, ‘the secular’ and ‘secularity’. The illusions of secularity and secular reason can only pretend to be independent of the modern discourse on religion. We tried to collaborate as much as we could with colleagues in other subject areas, though this proved to be difficult for all sorts of reasons.

One thing that united us in our ‘critical religion’ inflected teaching was our interest in our students, undergraduate as well as graduate. As well as teaching courses that fitted our own expertise, we wrote and taught core undergraduate lecture courses together as teamwork, which worked well. Our students at Stirling seemed on the whole to like them. Our students were always lively, sometimes brilliant people and full of early enthusiasm at the prospect of new knowledge, extended vocabulary, and interesting debates. That is, until the sheer grind of chasing grades got to them, like a continuation of the secondary school obsession with mechanical, robotic learning. We had lots of positive feedback and support from our undergraduates though. We have them to thank for testing us during our lectures and seminars and pushing us towards greater clarity. We hope that this Reader will be useful and perhaps inspire some of them.

As the After World Religions volume edited by David Robertson and Christopher Cotter (Routledge, 2016) powerfully indicates, it is not easy teaching religion while simultaneously historicizing and deconstructing the category ‘religion’, ‘religions’ and ‘world religions’. It feels counter-intuitive. However, that is a characteristic of critical thinking. It is as though we are exposing one illusory topic ‘religion’ in order to see the world more clearly, to be more aware of the ways our very general categories tend to reproduce an ideological formation serving specific interests while seeming to be merely descriptive and objective. Furthermore, ‘religion’ is not a stand-alone category, and, logically, other related categories such as secular, politics, nation state, modern, economics or progress (to give a few examples) require similar historicization. These reified rhetorical categories appear like value-neutral common sense. We use them with automatic but unconscious ease. However, this leads to very complex theoretical and pedagogical issues and for obvious reasons this more extended agenda was not so prominently pursued. The unstable and contested term ‘religion’ and its parasitic relation to ‘non-religious secular’ remained as the primary reference point.

Discourses on ‘religion’ are very much connected to colonial and neo-colonial power relations, and to constructions of ‘race’ and ‘gender’. These have been significant markers of inequality and discrimination, lurking behind pseudo-scientific classifications and the advance of ‘knowledge’. These issues of race and gender constructions are integral to critical religion.

The short essays here, which can be read at a sitting on a train or bus journey, or as a quick feed of ideas for further research on some project, are a good way to inform a wider audience about the theoretical and methodological implications of critical religion. I hope that many people, regardless of whether they are undergraduate, postgraduate or faculty, or members of the reading public, and regardless of whether they are in religious studies, political studies, postcolonial studies, economics, history, Eng.Lit, Sports, or any other discipline, will read through this collection, and notice the great range of topics that lend themselves to critical deconstruction of religion and the religion-secular binary. I am grateful to the three editors, my Stirling colleagues, and all the contributors for their originality and creativity in pursuing this critical agenda.

Timothy Fitzgerald

INTRODUCTION

What is Critical Religion and Why Does It Matter?

This volume presents 26 short articles that span topics from stained glass to homosexuality to the Research Excellence Framework, and which have geographically diverse foci from Britain to Lebanon to Japan. What brings them together is that they all share a critical approach to the concept ‘religion’. The word ‘critical’ here should be understood in a positive sense: scholars of Critical Religion seek to illuminate the various uses of the category ‘religion’ and reflect on the consequences that follow from some communities and their practices, texts, behaviours or objects being labelled as either ‘religious’ or ‘non-religious’.

Critical Religion’s entry point is the understanding that religion is not a thing that is simply there ‘in the world’. While many people would claim that they know a religion ‘when they see one’, there are ongoing debates in Religious Studies on how to define the very subject of the discipline, or whether it should be defined, or whether in academic discourse we should even have a term ‘religion’ that is wrought with so many complexities and associations with conflict and violence.

Critical Religion emphasizes that the category religion has developed in a specific historical context. In particular, many of the current connotations of ‘religion’ have been shaped by enlightenment thinking and the assumption that there should be a private sphere