Theses on the critique of “religion”

Abstract

Those of us who study the history and politics of the concept of religion and its related terms often find that our peers in adjacent disciplines or subdisciplines do not take into account our findings and continue to use the terms naively and unreflexively. Perhaps this is because they are unaware of the problematic norms knotted into the history of the concept or the contested political stakes involved in its use. Or, perhaps they are engaged in just the very sort of politics our subdiscipline documents. When discussing this with one of the editors of CRR, he asked me to outline why those not engaged in the historicization of the concept of religion should take our work into account. How or why would a contemporary sociologist of religion benefit from reading, for example, a discourse analysis of Reformation-era theologico-political rhetoric? To that end, here I put forward the following theses on the critique of the concept of religion, making the case, as boldly and as succinctly as I can, why our work is relevant to all who write on “religion,” and provide references to the essential literature on the subject for those who wish to pursue further reading on the matter.

Contextualizing “religion” of young Karl Marx: A preliminary analysis

“…This is partly because, as he has demonstrated elsewhere (McKinnon, 2002, 2006), McKinnon does not agree with many aspects of the deconstructive project of “religion.” In contrast, this article echoes the so-called critical religion perspective (e.g. Fitzgerald, 2015; Martin, 2015), which would not agree with McKinnon’s analytical use of the term “religion” in his writing. Nevertheless, I do not intend to be another critique of “religion” in McKinnon’s writing.…”

What makes Critical Religion critical? A response to Russell McCutcheon

“…However, we do not have a party line. CRR has and will continue to publish those within the critical religion camp including Timothy Fitzgerald (2015), Craig Martin (2015a), and Mitsutoshi Horii (2019) among others. McCutcheon misinterprets a sentence in the aims and scope, which he not only quotes but places in italics as emphasis: “The journal seeks to enhance an understanding of how religious institutions and thought may simultaneously serve as a source of domination and progressive social change (emphasis added).” 3 Somehow, from this he derives that one of the goals of the journal is “ not to identify the ideological nature of religion per se ” when this sentence means precisely that.…”

“…In this chapter, they argue that only by “anchoring human action in the mundane, historical world of interests and contests” can scholarship steer clear of “unreflectively reproducing participants interests and self-understandings” (130–131). Craig Martin (2015c) explains how this relates to values in the exchange published in the Religion Bulletin where he sees values as being reducible to interests. Surely, values are driven by interests but they are not reducible to them alone.…”

“…McCutcheon’s criticisms are an elaboration of a position that he took in a debate on Facebook which broke out over the 2014 editorial titled “Can a Religious Approach be Critical?” (Goldstein, Boyarin, and Boer 2014). The Facebook exchange was subsequently published online in Religion Bulletin (Martin 2015b, 2015c). The position presented in the editorials triggered responses by the Culture on the Edge Group (Martin et al.…”

Why be critical? Introducing a symposium onCapitalizing Religion

“…Four editorials -jointly by Warren S. Goldstein, Roland Boer, Rebekka King, and Jonathan Boyarin -set out the more Marxist, Frankfurt School end of the spectrum (Goldstein, Boyarin, and Boer 2013;2014;. Martin -along with Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, and others -has countered by defending a reflexive-historicizationof-concepts conception of critique (Martin et al 2014;Martin 2015a;2015b;2015c;Fitzgerald 2015). The majority of scholars taking this side of the debate are affiliated with the Culture on the Edge group (http://edge.ua.edu/).…”