Chris: "I think the left's whole "Religion=Bad" fixation probably has a lot to do with the legacy of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe, when there basically was no separation of church and state and churches were officially
giving their endorsements to particular oppressive sorts of regimes."
Ulhas: "Hindu/Muslims riots would gather momentum, when anti British struggles were declining. However, both communalisms, whether Hindu or Muslim, have very little to do with religion. They are fascistoid mass political movements."
Dennis: I believe Joanna's original point had to do with dealing with atheism vs. belief/faith within left or pwog circles... Correct me if I err, but whenever atheists credit believers with positive contributions, it always seems to me condescending. For all the "tolerance" atheists supposedly possess, I rarely see it in threads like this.
I've outlined above the quotes which have inspired the following rant. Religion does not exist. Jonathan Z. Smith, Historian of religion and one of the most well respected figures in our field wrote: "There is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study" (Imagining Religion, 1982). This is where we are today. All this stuff about "religion this" and "religion that" is a pretence - a comment without substantial reality. There is no "religious object." At least there is no religious object for the scholar of religion. I'll put that out there right away - lest the objection arise "but I'm a shaman, not a scholar!" As scholars it is important to strive for conceptual clarity. Here we go.
Religion began as a Christianity category. True, it was Greek first, but it was the Christians that pressed it into service as a concept. Religion meant the true and universal church. The concept religion has meaning internal to Christianity. It meant piety, faith and action, i.e. a practicing member of Christian community. It was a concept created by Christians for Christians. Hence, the MASSIVE problems of using "religion" to describe "Hinduism," "Aboriginal traditions," "Shinto," "Confucianism," "Daoism," "Buddhism," and so on. None of these "traditions" fall under the definitions of religion prior to the 20th century. They only became included when the definition of religion was expanded to included EVERYTHING. That's a problem for our field, the study of religion, it is a COLONIAL concept through and through.
Nevertheless, from about 1492 onward Europeans started using the term religion in an enlarged sense. Four religious traditions where outlined: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Paganism. A religion had to include: creeds and beliefs, a separation of secular and sacred, and a notion of exclusive membership. Over the next 300 years or so this gradually changed and religion became "universalised." This universalization was NOT done in the name of the history of "religion" - it was done under the rubric of "the philosophy of religion" or outright theology. Naturally this definition excludes most of what one would find in an intro to religion textbook....
Trends in this direction (why religion was universalised): Thomas Hobbes argued for the priority of the public good over private belief; public religion was to deal with welfare and private religion with worship. Hobbes turned worship into esoteric piety, which had historically been a heresy. Devolution was "supposed" to be public. Deism and Deists (Hume, Jefferson, Diderot, Lessing, etc.) made a distinction between the truth of religion and the origin of the religion. Hume, for instance, argued that religion had its origin in nature (polytheism was a way of introducing intermediaries when the monotheistic deity became too distant). Natural religion is a religion that we are aware of 'by nature.' It entails the idea natural intuition will guide us all to believe in a Creator, to do good and avoid evil, and to have some notion of an afterlife. Deism kind of installed religion as an anthropological feature of humankind.
Rousseau opted for something different. Rousseau argued for the religion of the citizen - opposed to the natural religion of the deists and the revealed religion of the clerics, Rousseau sought religion in the ethos of the nation.
Kant really got started though... arguing that ethics leads to religion. First we have reason, religion (superstition) follows from that. Reason translates revelation into reason, thus saving religion from being blind.
Schleiermacher, disliking Rousseau and Kant, argued that religion was about feeling, a taste of the infinite, the sublime. He opted for the organic Romanticism: the unity of nature and spirit. Hegel hated him, but Schleiermacher, with is hermeneutic grace, extended warmth even to the Hegels of this world.
So: 1. Religion = nation (bind people together) 2. Religion = derivative of morality, rationality (religion = ornamental) 3. Religion = inward feeling requiring outward expression
These trends are paradigmatic for many of the primary ways in which people approach religion today. The Durkheimians and Hegelians and neo-Aristotelians fall into 1. The Kantians and atheists and etc. fall into 2. and the spiritualists, new agers, and most of the theologians and philosophers of religion fall into 3.
All three of these approaches grant, willingly or unwillingly, autonomy to "religion" - as an experience that cannot be reduced to any other field (i.e. religion cannot be explained (away) by sociology, psychology, anthropology, etc). This is why they emerge first out of the philosophy of religion. The problem is: what is this "religious" object? It is religion sui generis. For a detailed critique see Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (1997). This book has become the subject of *the* great debate between the study of religion and the practice of religion in North America (my experience having attended many of the international conferences). With the publication of McCutcheon book, which I'll take as symbolic of the END of the debate - we figured it out. Religion does not exist, it is a category of scholarly creation. Those who want religion to exist, and I would include historians such as Huston Smith and Mircea Eliade along with a host of other phenomenologists-comparativists-mystics-psychologists (William James, Rudolph Otto, Paul Tillich, Nathan Soderblom, van der Leeuw, to mention only the most prolific) do so for POLITICAL reasons. Usually: God will save us!!! This is problematic for Leftist politics... it is problematic for non-Leftist politics too!
Obviously the debate is not over in a practical sense - but in a "philosophical" sense it is over. The philosophy of religion folks, in whatever their form, have set up their camps and recognise their historiography. #3 is the most popular and common today - but we should not fail to notice that "religion" coincides with what has historically been called aesthetics. Schleiermacher is a conveniently representative figure here. When spirit and nature were seen to be unified, art became the intermediary. Interestingly - it was around this time that the concept of "genius" was secularised. Prior to Romanticism, genius was a theological concept, having to do with revelation. Through Romanticism genius became secularised through the contact of Europeans with shaman from a variety of locals. Of course shaman were despised as agents of the devil, but the missionaries did not fail to notice that they chanting, trances, story-telling, singing, dancing and rituals actually healed people. They concluded that such elements, aesthetic elements, had the power to heal. These figures were, in effect, secular geniuses - thus was born the secular genius, the person, the artist, with the capacity to heal, or be inspired without divine intervention. If one looks at the history of torture we also see the pain is secularised at the exact same moment. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular for details on this point. Even the most fundamentalist regime tends to use the Christian argument for the separation of church and state to defend some of its main tenets.
To get back to my point. Today we have a plausible model for the separation of the philosophy of religion from the history of religion. Friedrich Max Muller is usually identified as the 'founder' of the study of religion [1823-1900]. He was interested in the ancient writings of India and a student of Friedrich Schelling, a philologist by training and a mythologist and linguist by reputation and profession. Muller used the phrase: "science of religion" to describe the basic methodological assumptions at work in what he was doing (working for Oxford U and the East India Company). Muller argued for an absolute separation between "revelation" and the discoveries of "science." He thought the two would coincide, but argued that they must be kept separate in terms of the investigation.
Muller's approach seems to coincide with the Lockean distinction between public and private (a distinction which has never made much sense within the context of the history of religions) but that's not quite the point. If we look carefully we will see that NONE of the modern writers reject religion out of hand, at least none of them reject the philosophy of religion. Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Fraser, Muller, Tylor, Tiele, Wellhausen, Robertson Smith, Mannhardt, Schiller, Troeltsch, Bousset, Durkheim, Marett, Weber... all incorporate something of the autonomy of religion within their work - either as the transcendental, the sacred, mana, the charismatic, the artistic, etc. In one way or another - all of these approaches, philosophical or methodological, incorporate theological premises. This is why historiography is so important - because that's what corrects the problematic methodological assumptions of the field, 'the study of religion.' Seen remarkable work of Hans Kippenberg for a shockingly coherent example of the position outlined here.
Now we have this: Religion is: 1) a system of symbols which acts to 2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by 3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and 4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that 5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. - Clifford Geertz
Which is a definition of religion as worldview. This potentially makes anything religious that one wants to be religious... This definition coincides with the desire, today, to PRESERVE religion by protecting it. Geertz isn't interested in this directly, but he is participating in the attempt to carve out modern space for the irrational. Let's not make any mistake about this: most of the scholars I've mentioned here either see religion as REVELATION from a divine being OR as IRRATIONAL. The Revelation folks want religion to dominate the world, the religion=irrational people want to see limited to the public sphere. The problem is --> both defend religion in various ways.
It would seem that even with Neizschean excess - religion is that which people want to protect at almost any cost.
MOST of the "religious debates" today that take place by well known social-theory scholars --> Habermas, Zizek, Derrida to name a few of the well known.... ALL these figures are HORRIBLY naive and uninformed about the history of religion. None of them give a damn about history OR the history of religion. That's fine enough... but the problem is they miss something very important. All of them take religion seriously. That's their problem. Religion does not exist... but if we act or treat it as though it does, we're CREATING a space within the public sphere that is legitimately immune from criticism. Habermas, for example, shouldn't be treating theologians as social theorists --> he should treat theologians AS political writers, as citizens taking up political positions. He doesn't... in effect, he ends up suckering himself into the assumptions of theology --> which have already been discredited from within his own theoretical framework. Derrida's writings on religion leave open the mystical... which is the sui generis argument.... leaving the transcendental sublime untouched and unquestioned to some degree. I find this very weird. Zizek... he's just making this stuff up as he goes along, which is fine I guess. My problem with Zizek on St. Paul, for example, is that it opens up the door for a confessional faith that has been waiting for a legitimate politics to come along and support it. We have, for instance, a new Zizekian theology emerging - which Zizek hasn't done much to prevent from happening.
Anyway... Here's my immediate response to the quotes above:
My comment to Joanna: The Left can deal with religion productively if it does not treat religion as "religious." Religion does not exist... faith and belief are POLITICAL positions, shaped by the modernism of the authors of the concept - whatever of the three paradigms of the philosophy of religion that one follows. I regard it has highly productive to not see the difference between religion and culture... the separation is a political decision that protects one aspect of culture / civilisation from criticism. In this sense, "religion" is reactionary.
My comment to Chris: in the 18th and 19th century we saw an very complicated and complex DEFENCE of religion, although transformed by movements in the economy, aesthetics, technology, colonialism, etc. I would argue, though, that there is a CATEGORICAL judgement at work here: "religion = good." What is bad is a particular kind of religious expression which appears bad depending on your politics: enthusiasm, fanaticism, puritanism, legalists, casuists, traditionalists, etc. If we look at all of these categories together they include everyone... What is interesting is that we find a systematic defence of religion, although not always in its traditional monotheistic form.
My comment to Ulhas: Yes! X has "very little to do with religion." That's precisely how we should be approaching "religion." My only additional comment would be: it isn't just communalisms that we should view as being political. Virtually the entire realm of the "religious-private" should be open to some sort of public criticism - because it is POLITICAL.
My comment to Dennis: The whole idea of "faith" and "belief" is a non-issue. Faith is a fancy name given to someone who wants to protect their political position from criticism. This can be done by arguing for a separation of public and private OR a merger of the public and private. Either way - it is a concept put on the table to represent a position that cannot be contested. All faith is "bad faith" when it comes to politics. Faith and belief are concepts on par with omnipotence - in the sense that they don't make sense. Yes, we have the words, but the words do not conceptually hold together... and their political implications are deep and serious.
Please send criticisms somewhere else.
ken