“Religion” Is Not a Stand-Alone Category
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
It is well known that religion is essentially peace-loving, nonviolent, nonpolitical, concerned with the inner spiritual life and the other world. Religion is kind, tolerant, gentle, nonpolitical and nonprofit-making. Religion is a matter of personal faith and piety, essentially separated from the nonreligious secular state, from politics, and from economics. Religion is concerned with personal and family morality, but not with laws, which are the affair of the state. Religion is essentially that domain of private experience in which the individual soul concerns itself with the rewards and punishments of an afterlife in another world.
On the other hand it is equally well known that religion is essentially barbarous, violent, and irrational, causing conflicts through religious terrorism and religious nationalism. This view of religion as essentially violent and irrational is popular today, especially since 9/11. It is said—frequently said—that if religion is confused with politics it becomes dangerously unstable, like a Molotov cocktail. It ceases to be true (pure) religion, and becomes a compound of incompatible elements that will blow up in our face.
This is also a matter of rationality and irrationality, of civility and barbarity. A benign, reasonable religious group understands the logic of separation, as any decent chemist understands that certain chemical elements should not be mixed. Being reasonable, such groups or individuals sensibly accept religion’s voluntary and private status, and generally subscribe to the sentiment that one should give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s. Whether one can honestly say that the pope’s status conforms to this modern logic is arguable. He is, after all, Pontifex Maximus, a title he inherited directly from the divine Roman emperor. This is one of the reasons why Protestants used to refer to the pope as the Whore of Babylon. But Catholicism has a certain respectability even in the citadels of secular capital. It is at least European and Christian after a fashion. Sadly, barbarous “religious” foreigners do not understand the distinction between Caesar and God, and they do not grasp rational (secular) politics. However, though irrational and fanatical, religious terrorists are cunning, more cunning than their nonreligious cousins. From the point of view of State power, whether US, Chinese, or other, some religious leaders—mullahs, imams, the Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks in Vietnam and Burma, Jesuit priests in Latin America, or whoever cleaves to a powerful alternative view of the world that challenges the values and institutionalized practices of capitalism—pretend to be religious but are really political. They use religion illegitimately for what are truly political ends.
Classifying groups and their leaders as religious, or as genuinely religious, or as pretending to be religious but really being political, is a widespread practice that is parasitic on an ideological fiction, a discourse supported by courts of law, academics, and politicians, and reported widely in the media.
In all these discourses there is a tacit idea that the nonreligious secular State is (to paraphrase William T. Cavanaugh) essentially peace-loving and reasonable, and only reluctantly violent, as in “the war on terror.” The contemporary flourishing of the military-industrial complex and the vast outreach of US military power should not lead us to confuse the rational and reluctant political violence of the peace-loving secular state with the mad acts of savagery perpetrated by “religious” fanatics who cannot see the wisdom of markets or the rational inevitability of private property.
If, however, we take account—with writers such as King and Carrette in their book Selling Spirituality (2005)—of the unlimited devotion to capital and the ideology of “free” markets that the modern State serves and protects, then we can ask if capitalism is not itself a religion.1 Liberal capitalism has many of the characteristics that are typically attributed to “religion.” This observation leads me to propose that, instead of uncritically assuming a universally valid binary distinction between religious and nonreligious secular practices, we instead see a vast network of human practices that have both distinctive characteristics and overlapping resemblances. Thus, buddha dhamma (usually mistranslated as the religion Buddhism) as it is practiced in southeast Asia is profoundly different from the Catholic faith, so much so that their simultaneous classification as “religions” stretches the credibility of the category. Yet some versions of the liberal Protestant faith seem closer to faith in money, progress, and market salvation. And again in turn the science of economics looks suspiciously more like astrology in its predictive practices than, say, yoga.
If liberal capitalism fulfills many of the usual criteria of a “religious faith”—arguably as many characteristics as other human practices—then what are the implications for our classification systems? The very idea of secular courts and constitutions, secular schools and universities, secular knowledge, including the so-called science of economics, becomes problematic. For the claim that such domains are nonreligiously secular depends on a parasitical relation to the idea of the religious as something essentially different. Embedded in our daily language and our institutions is the presumption of an essential difference between secular and religious experiences or practices. By reclassifying as “religious” our faith in capital and its ritual management by state and city functionaries, we have trouble locating the imagined domain of the nonreligious secular at all. Meanwhile, the term “religion” becomes so all-inclusive as to fade into useless abstraction. This kind of radical instability in usages of the term “religion” and its relation to these other categories, taken as a globalizing Anglophone discourse that is rhetorically manipulated by specific agents in specific power contexts, leads to a consideration of the term “critical religion.”
“CRITICAL RELIGION” AS A TERM
I use the term “critical religion” as shorthand for the critical study of the category “religion” and its discursive formations in relation to other categories, such as “pagan” in the older discourse and the nonreligious secular in the prevailing dominant mode. Clearly, if religion is not a stand-alone category but wedded inescapably to the nonreligious secular, then critical religion amounts to a project for bringing to light the interlinked ideological functions of the so-called nonreligious domains that are parasitic on the invention of religion for their conceptualization. The categories with which “religion” has historically and significantly been linked in various ways can be discovered through the analysis of texts and other discursive media. A category can be linked to others in various ways, for example by identity, or simile, or separation, or encompassment. Some obvious candidates of categories related to “religion” in one or another way are “ecclesiastical,” “spiritual,” “temporal,” “pagan,” “civil,” “civility,” “barbarity,” “secular,” “politics,” “the state,” “science,” “economics,” “sacred,” and “profane.” These are all English-language terms with close readings in some other European languages; and they all have an Anglophone or widely Europhone history.2 None of these terms has any essential, ahistorical meaning that can be captured, for example, by a stable and enduring definition that does not itself represent some interest. However, some categories have greater scope for generating ideological illusion than others. Some of these terms are ancient but have taken on significantly new meanings in modern discourses. Some are modern inventions. All of these words are and have been controlled in their dominant usages by powerful interests of one kind or another, and are not therefore simply neutral players in a language game. If by game we mean something played for fun, then language games are not really games at all (though what is a game?) but are possible constructions of the world that have been prioritized because they serve powerful and dominant interests.3 The expression “politic state of the nation” has a significantly different nuance from “the nation is a political state,” even though there are shared significant terms.
To give a simple but powerful example to which I return in more detail below: the dominant discourse on “religion” for centuries concerned Christian Truth, and on this meaning, Religion was related by mutual exclusion with pagan barbarity. However, pagan barbarity was also defined by Christian Truth at the moment that it was being posited as its “other”; and the meaning of Christian Truth was tightly controlled by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities. I suggest that the idea of “religions” in the plural, though evident in discourses going back at least to the late sixteenth century or early seventeenth, was an ironic conceit until the late eighteenth century (and probably still is in many contemporary discourses). A non-Christian “religion,” if the expression was used, meant an irrational pagan substitute for Truth, in other words a sign of being lost to barbarity and damnation. Only since relatively recently has the supposedly neutral idea of generic “religion”—that is, religion as universally manifested in different “religions,” languages, and cultural contexts at all times of history and even prehistory—become dominant. These older and more recent constructions of “religion” are fundamentally antagonistic to each other. Yet the older discourse of religion as Christian Truth (of which presumably there could only be one) and also the modern, more dominant discourse of generic religion as a universal aspect of human nature and society are both current and entangled together in texts across the humanities and social sciences. I shall argue that this ambiguity enhances the rhetorical power of a category such as religion-secular.4 The border between them is thoroughly permeable, and what gets to be included or excluded can depend on the rhetorical needs of the writer or speaker at any given time. I suggest that the main function of contemporary discourses on religion is not to report what is there, but to embed without question the supposed natural rationality and disinterestedness of the nonreligious secular. The secular is the authoritative ground from which the judge, scholar, politician, and scientist claim to make her or his pronouncements.
RELIGIONS ARE NOT OBJECTS THAT EXIST IN THE WORLD, BUT COLLECTIVE IMAGINARY CONSTRUCTIONS
Many experts on the religions of the world talk and write as though these are observable entities that can be empirically investigated for their properties. Some academics push further and write as though religion is not only an observable object but even a transcendental agent that manifests him- or herself in different “religions.” Religion is depicted as an agent with an agenda, central to which is the unjust harassment of the peace-loving secular state.
Jonathan Fox, in his article in the Journal of Peace Research, “The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945–2001,” claims to be able to prove statistically that religion has a special relation to violence. This assumption derives in part from the popular but misleading narrative about how the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 brought the Wars of Religion to an end and established the modern nation-state. Religion, which at that time meant mainly Catholic or Protestant Christian claims to truth, legitimacy, and civility, became associated with intolerance and fanatical violence, and the story has it that, as a result, the neutral, nonreligious secular state had to be invented to keep the peace. Religion was sent into “exile,” banished from public life, disciplined by rational government, privatized, and transformed into a purely personal faith practice concerned with God, with the inner, with judgment in the other world.
From this point on, the general progress of humankind, securely founded on natural secular reason instead of wild faith, was able to surge ahead, until suddenly and inexplicably since the late 1970s, and especially with 9/11, “religion” in various forms—the Iranian revolution, Hindu or Sikh nationalism, Islamic jihad, and others—awoke from its slumbers in exile, where it had refused to die, and resurged as a global agent in the world.
The author uses statistics from two databases, Minorities at Risk (MAR) and State Failure (SF). He is interested in why “religion” was so comprehensively ignored by IR theorists as an important factor in world politics before around 1980, and why it suddenly became such a major concern. Fox answers the first question in the following way:
Rather than having a theory as to why religion was not important, international relations tended to focus on factors that did not include religion. Paradigms like realism, liberalism, and globalism placed their emphasis on military and economic factors as well as rational calculations, all of which left little room for religion.… This trend can be traced to the fact that the academic study of international relations was founded upon, among other things, the belief that the era of religion causing wars was over.5
Note that, according to this passage, paradigms that focus on rational calculation, and on military and economic issues, leave “little room for religion.”
Why, then, was there a dramatic upsurge in the place of religion in international affairs in the thinking of IR specialists? All of these assumptions began to be questioned from the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of such events as the Iranian revolution, the rise of the “religious right” in US politics, the events in Waco, Texas, in 1993, and of course 9/11. These events had a galvanizing effect such that “by the beginning of the 21st century, a considerable body of theory developed, positing that religion remains important in the modern era. To an extent, this body of theory was inspired by the facts on the ground. Simply put, real world events have disproved the theories of religion’s demise.”6
Here, explicitly, the continued existence of “religion” is a matter of empirical observation: “facts on the ground” in the “real world.” One thing that becomes apparent from Fox’s summary is that, in IR and related disciplines, and presumably for Fox himself, “religions” are observable objects. Empirical observation tells one that religion is still alive and active, and that the previous empirical data that religion had met its demise has proved illusory. This is expressed as a witness statement. We saw what we thought was a body lying on the ground, either asleep or dead. But suddenly it started moving. Then it sprang to its feet and attacked us.
Furthermore, according to other experts such as Mark Juergensmeyer, this living corpse wears many masks: not only is religion a universal agent, but it incarnates in specific religions.7 It is a fact on the ground that Islam is a religion that inspires rebellion and terrorism in multiple locations, Al-Qaeda is a religious terrorist organization, the Iranian revolution was a religious revolution, and so on. In contrast, Juergensmeyer himself, his academic practice of naming, and the nation-state of which he is a privileged citizen are tacitly constructed as everything that these “religious” fanatics are not: secular, rational, objective, liberal, neutral but peace-loving.
In the act of classifying other peoples’ practices as “religious”—a practice that the scholar Arvind Pal Mandair has described as an act of “epistemic violence”8—academic and nonacademic experts such as politicians and civil servants embed the assumption that religions exist and cause things to happen in some real and observable sense. Through these acts of rhetoric we have been persuaded, and continue to persuade ourselves and others, that we can occupy a disinterested and objective point of observation from which to make true statements about these phenomena. We deal in facts; we leave value judgments to others. But this in turn implies a value judgment: that our supposed neutrality and objectivity make us tolerant and sane, as well as intellectually superior.
But “religions” are not observable objects in the world. They are collective constructions of the imagination. Nobody has ever seen a religion, much as nobody has ever seen a “nation-state” or a “society.” None of these words refers to, or picks out, something like an object in the world that can be described, analyzed, compared, or made the object of neutral classification. People who tell us that there is a religion called “Christianity” and another one called “shinto” with such and such defining features are not really telling us what exists in the world, but attempting to persuade us to classify the world in a particular and peculiar way. Somehow this historically unique way of imagining the world, which emerged in a particular historical context of Christian European imperialism, has been rhetorically transformed into the real and unanswerable order of things. It is important for us secular moderns to believe in the existence of religions, just as it is important to believe in the existence of nations.9 Our act of faith in the existence and even agency of religion and religions makes other things possible.
RELIGIONS AS USEFUL WAYS TO CLASSIFY HUMAN PRACTICES AND INSTITUTIONS
Some experts, sensing that they might be in danger of committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or reification, say instead that, though it is true that religions are merely general categories, they are useful general categories. They help to bring a large number of practices, institutions, beliefs, and experiences under one class. What we have are a range of practices and experiences that hold enough in common to be conveniently classified as being of one distinct kind—“religious practices.” These can be distinguished from those belonging to a fundamentally different kind, “nonreligious” practices such as political, economic, scientific, legal, academic, or artistic. Thus according to this line of thinking we can talk helpfully about religious experiences as a common type of experience had by people everywhere and at all times and places. This kind of position allows that these experiences, or the practices that they are supposed to explain, may admittedly be different from one another, because they are mediated by different languages and cultural or historical contexts. However, they hold sufficient similarities for it to be strategically useful to classify them all as “religious,” rather than nonreligious, for example, “political” or “scientific.” In this way we break up the world into manageable sections without which we would be unable to think or act at all.
This kind of argument does not solve the problem. For one thing, we need to remember that what counts as “religious” and “nonreligious” is not an innocent exercise of an abstract category that we, as individual academics, can make mean what we want. It is of great constitutional importance and frequently involves legal processes and the identities and rights of people. How are we to identify what does and does not usefully get included as “religious” or “nonreligious,” and why is it a better way to classify human experiences or practices than another? For example, by what criteria shall we decide that a particular act of violence is “religious” terrorism, another act is “political,” and a third is really “political” but merely masquerading as “religious”?10 Immediately one can see with these examples that the way we decide to classify our own or other people’s actions can have very serious consequences indeed. As Cavanaugh has shown in a number of works but also in chapter 54 of this volume, these ideologically determined usages underlie the modern myth that, whereas the violence of “religious extremists” is irrational, barbaric, and meaningless, the violence of the (Western) secular state is reluctant and rational.11
We can also see in these examples that some putatively essential distinctions have become embedded in the way that acts of violence get classified, even though the distinctions are really quite arbitrary. The idea that an act of violence is really political while masquerading as religious, or that religion and politics are getting mixed up and need to be kept separate, embeds their essential distinction in the very act of rhetorical construction. Yet some scholars have not only made successful careers from framing their books in these terms, but compound their reputations by assuming the further authority of being neutral and objective observers, themselves disinterested in power and above the squalid conflict of ideological imperatives.
Many historians who are experts in early modern history write as though our modern Anglophone or more widely Europhone ways of ordering the world were already established in the seventeenth or even sixteenth centuries. Yet it can surely be argued that people thinking in English would not have distinguished religious from nonreligious practices, or religious violence from political violence. This was not because they were more stupid or backward than us, but because the dominant discourse of those days, Religion as encompassing Christian Truth, did not allow such distinctions to be made. The idea of “the State” or “politics” as it is understood in today’s terms did not exist, and these words were only beginning to emerge (in English at least) in the seventeenth century, and did not take on their modern usage until the late eighteenth century. Even in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century the idea of the State as a distinct, nonreligious entity defined by a written constitution and “religion” as a generic private right and voluntary association was not a fait accompli but was still in the making. Indeed, the point of this argument is that these configurations of categories are still in the making, they are continuing acts of persuasion, and academics are not describing independent realities as much as reconvincing themselves and others that they exist as such. We are deluded by our own rhetorical constructions. We are all collectively involved in making and remaking these imagined domains as though they somehow exist as independent realities.
Some historians have shown us how we have invented traditions and made them appear as old as the hills.12 Similarly I suggest we have invented religion and religions as religious traditions that are essentially different from nonreligious secular domains. The modern invention of religion in this sense is analogous to the point that Gellner has made about modern nationalism and nations: “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.”13
But many historians seem resistant to the idea that categories like “religion” and “politics” and the putative differences between them are modern inventions, and not timeless domains inherent in human nature and fixed in the order of things. The uncritical habit of some modern historians who reconstruct the past in today’s categories, and who talk as though “religion” and “politics” are domains eternally embedded in the nature of European history, is engaged in an ideological act at the very moment that they represent themselves as disinterested observers. This kind of misrepresentation seems even more obvious when scholars claim to be writing about the religion and politics of the Incas or fourteenth-century China (to take arbitrary examples). Today’s powerful controllers of language in the media and the political domains, enthusiastically helped by un-self-critical academics, deploy these distinctions in culturally and linguistically complicated situations where clear communication and accurate representation are urgently required to solve problems of human conflict.
THE POWER OF RHETORIC
Another term we can use for powerful discourses is rhetorical constructions. Richard Roberts and J. M. M. Good in their The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences (1993) argue that “rhetoric has played a central part in the formation, development and legitimation of the emerging human sciences.… If we are to understand the present-day classifications and hierarchies of the various disciplines in the human sciences, then it is essential to understand their rhetorical constitution.”14 One of the key points they make about rhetoric, in concordance with their contributor Michael Cahn, is that rhetoric not only constructs disciplines and domains of discourse but also disguises their origins in ways that make them appear as commonplaces, as part of the common order of things.15 I suggest that writers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries such as John Locke, William Penn, and Bishop Hoadly (there were many others) were rhetorically constructing the meaning of “religion” in a new way, a contested discourse that through time has come to appear as a natural truth that it is counterintuitive to challenge. They were attempting to subvert the dominant idea of Religion as Christian Truth, a Truth that encompassed the whole of reality, and to persuade us to think that religion is essentially private and personal, and that “religious organizations” are merely voluntary associations of like-minded believers. In the process they promoted the idea of “politics,” civil society, and the State as essentially nonreligious. Instead of encompassing Christian Truth, the opposite of which was falsehood and irrationality, they made an essential distinction between the religious and the nonreligious. To strengthen this rhetorical act of persuasion they deployed a number of backup dichotomies such as private and public, inner and outer, this world and other world, natural and supernatural, faith and scientific knowledge, metaphysics and empiricism, so that each binary can stand in for the others in a chain of substitutions in a constant deferral of meaning, each being used in circular fashion to define and thus to substantiate the others. This new idea of the essential distinction between the religious and the nonreligious caught on powerfully in North America, for reasons that need to be explored, and became incorporated into the Bills of Rights and state constitutions.
As I have been arguing, “religion” is not a stand-alone category. It is joined at the hip with “secular politics,” the state, and other supposedly nonreligious domains such as economics. This new imagining of “religion” was simultaneously the invention of a new binary, forming the basis for two new essentialized domains, “religion” and “nonreligion.” In a complex historical process, the older binary between Christian Truth and pagan falsehood was replaced as the dominant trope by the binary opposition between generic religion and the nonreligious, scientifically rational secular. The world dominance of Euro-America came to be largely expressed in the orientalist binaries of secular rationality as against the irrational traditions of religious backwardness.16
ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT
This formulation is encoded in the thesis of secularization: for example, in the distinction between the magical enchantments of primitives (including our own pre-Protestant ancestors) as against the progressive disenchantment of true rational knowledge of the world. Our own fetishistic enchantment with the circulation of commodities, self-regulating markets, money, private property, and capital, for example, is represented as a rational and factual confrontation with the real order of things, freed at last from the centuries of irrational superstition. I suggest instead that we moderns are knee-deep in superstitions, which we proudly proclaim to be a brave confrontation with the really real.
This basic opposition typically gets formulated in various binary terms like “religion and politics,” or “religion and the state,” or “religion and science.” The widely understood meanings of all these terms became radically changed or newly invented. They came to denote domains with clear differences, all of which could be classified under the more general categories “religious” and “nonreligious.” And this presumption is tacit in every claim that religion can be studied scientifically, or that religion and politics sometimes come dangerously into conflict, or that religion is a private right that in any civilized society ought to be guaranteed by the secular state.
The rhetorical origins of these distinctions, while well known, were also strategically forgotten, because they became normalized in Enlightenment reason, along with a range of other essentialized dichotomies: soul and body, spirit and matter, supernature and nature, rational science and irrational or nonrational faith. The modern academic discipline of religious studies and the much wider academic discursive deployment of “religion” and “spiritualities” were formulated within this hegemonic discourse. But the same can be said for the modern invention of “science” or “politics” or “economics.” In principle we could take any of these categories as our starting point. Thus, when we talk about “religion” as a rhetorical construction, we are also always tacitly talking about what is being constructed as outside religion. When a historian told me recently that he wasn’t interested in religion, I pointed out to him that his self-identity as a secular historian is historically and conceptually parasitic on the modern invention of religion and religions. You could not have a category and powerful discourse of the nonreligious secular without simultaneously having a category of the religious. They mutually implicate each other. There is no secular history without the exclusion of religion, or its transformation into an object of secular knowledge.
AN OLDER DISCOURSE: RELIGION AS CHRISTIAN TRUTH
Yet at the same time there is an older discourse of Christian Truth, in which both church and state were encompassed and which I shall refer to as the totalizing Church-State or Commonweal. This rhetorical construction was hegemonic long before the modern binary became progressively articulated. Religion emerged as a distinct and separated domain in the context of colonialism and the nation-state as it was emerging as a distinct, abstract, rational, nonreligious, imagined entity. This older discourse, along with its partial replacement by the modern one, has been generally suppressed from the collective memory. This is one of the functions of rhetoric, to make a particular imaginaire seem eternal, natural, incontestable, part of the order of things. This is achieved through the suppression of historical memory. Ironically historians are important actors in this process, frequently reconstructing the past in today’s dominant categories and thus making our contemporary assumptions—the distinction between religious and political practices, for example—seem inherent in human nature.
I said that the older discourse on religion as Christian Truth, along with its replacement by a new dominant paradigm of religion as a universal, private right, has been generally suppressed from memory. However, there are quite obvious domains, pockets of resistance if you like, in which it still operates, such as evangelical Protestantism. Actually, if you carefully analyze the rhetoric of contemporary academics and politicians, and the analytical models of anthropologists and sociologists, or the language used by evangelical Christian missionaries, you can quickly detect vestiges of the older discourse mixed up and confused with the more dominant modern one. If the modern invention of the religious and the secular was remembered as a historical process connected with the growth of colonial wealth and power, the whole religion industry, which promotes rhetoric on religion and religions as though it is obvious what is meant, would come to seem untenable. This confusion of discourses operates to obscure the assumptions about the rhetorical construction not of “religion” alone, as though that category refers to something of and in its own right, but simultaneously of “religion” in problematic relation to “state,” “politics,” and other modern categories of “secular” rationality such as “economics” or “science.”
THE IDEOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES
Religious studies departments typically justify their existence by claiming either that religions are important objects in the world that need to be studied or that there is a distinct class of religious experiences and practices that are essentially different from nonreligious ones such as political, scientific, economic, or aesthetic ones. While some theorists will claim that these are merely heuristic distinctions, and should not be taken to imply essential differences, a study of the actual usages of languages shows this to be a shallow claim. Whatever conscious methodological intentions the writer may or may not have, the recycling of discourses on religion and religions in hundreds of books, journal articles, and conference papers marks out and constructs religion and religious things as distinct and different from the nonreligious ones. These latter are in turn classified as secular political, economic, or aesthetic, and thus mystified as essentially distinct from “religious” practices. From behind our closed departmental doors, political scientists, historians, lawyers, educationalists, economists, anthropologists, and social scientists construct the religion-secular dichotomy in their own contexts in accordance with their own research interests and funding requirements.
In religious studies this tacit distinction between the religious and the nonreligious is reproduced as though it were a fact of nature in special journals, conferences, university lecture courses, school curricula, research seminars, and symposia. The very act of writing a secular account of religion quietly embeds the distinction without anyone really noticing. This in turn underwrites the presumption that science is essentially different from religion, just as “knowledge” is essentially different from “faith,” or “nature” is essentially different from “supernature.” I can hear some readers shouting denials, but once one has looked at how language is actually used one can find that religion is rhetorically constructed as essentially different from other so-called nonreligious domains.
Yet a look at the practices of so-called secular institutions can throw doubt on the validity of this powerful discourse. For instance one could argue that there is nothing essentially different about the American Academy of Religion, which is supposed to be a secular academic event, from the annual hajj at Mecca. To attend the AAR is to engage in a kind of pilgrimage, to participate in a vast liturgical chant, to congregate in smaller chapels of specialized devotion, to adopt demeanors of pious confession, to observe taboos, obey disciplinary abstentions, and submit to hierarchical pronouncements.
All these reproductions of discourses on religion have a fundamental ideological function of embedding “religion” as part of human nature, and thus making it seem difficult to question. Perhaps even more importantly, by embedding “religion” as ubiquitous, we simultaneously embed the nonreligious. When cognitive scientists claim that “religion” can be explained scientifically by evolutionary theory, and even posit a special gene for “it,” we can see mystification at work. The very form of this claim tacitly embeds “religion” (which as we have seen is an inherently confused category with powerful and contradictory meanings) as a distinct kind of “thing” that can be defined according to its universal characteristics. But the other side of this embedding is the unquestioned assumption not only that the term “religion” can be made to stand for a specific aspect of evolutionary behavior (as if, for example, counterintuitive beliefs are typically religious, but could not be found in science), but that science is a distinctly nonreligious kind of activity that can explain religion. This illusory assumption, which depends on an arbitrary decision about what some group of researchers has decided they want to mean by religion, has many powerful implications, for example, the way government funding gets channeled. That observation, however, still leaves us with the question of why governments should want to assume that there is an obvious class of practices that are nonreligious.
MEANINGS OF THE ANGLOPHONE TERM “RELIGION” IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
When, where, and how did the modern English-language discourse of “religion” and “religions” arise?
Religion as Christian Truth
For many centuries after the Reformation the term “Religion” meant Christian Truth, more frequently one of the Protestant versions. The opposite of Religion was not “the secular,” but Superstition. In the powerful Roman Catholic Church discourse, significant aspects of which were incorporated into the new Anglican church-state, Latin religio was sparingly used, for example, as a minor virtue subordinate to “justice.”17 In Protestant countries such as England, the term “Religion” emerged as Protestant Christian Truth encompassing the whole of reality. This Protestant conception reclassified the Catholic Church as part of the pagan world of superstition. But this change did not immediately lead into the modern religion-secular binary. Despite the significant reconfigurations of power heralded by the rise of Protestant power formations that challenged the Catholic status quo, the powerful imaginaire of the encompassment of Christian Truth persisted in the new national churches, and extended throughout the colonial empires. What was outside Religion could not properly exist: falsehood, ignorance, evil, all destined for hell, for a kind of limbo or nonbeing. True, there were disagreements about what constituted Christian Truth, not only between Catholics and Protestants but also between Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. But in the early modern period few doubted that the truth about the meaning of life was revealed through Christ, the Bible, and the church-state authorities. And, regardless of whether Catholic or Protestant, few doubted that Christian Truth encompassed all aspects of life, including what we have subsequently separated out as “the state” and as distinct spheres of political, economic, or scientific practice.
The “Religious” as a Status
The term “religious” (as distinct from “the religious”) is difficult to find in texts before the seventeenth century. It was generally only used in the sense of “the religious”—monks, nuns, friars, and also “the religious houses,” for example, monasteries, convents, and abbeys. “The religious” was a status within Christendom. These were abolished in England and other Protestant countries, such as Holland and some German states, though the term still persists in such contexts as Catholicism and high Anglicanism. At around the same time Catholicism was condemned by Protestants as “superstition,” along with “Mahometanism” (Islam) and Paganism. Thus in one early-seventeenth-century text, I found the Protestant expression “the superstitious religious,” a deliberate Protestant satirical play on words to describe the Catholic monastic orders.18 But this play is also an indication of a significant shift in nuance.
However, it should be noted that the adverb “religiously” seems to have a very ancient sense, possibly going back to the Roman religio.19 It was the religio of a soldier to serve the glory of Rome and extend her conquests, or of a senator to serve the Senate. One could say that the soldier and the senator honored their duties religiously—with religious attention to the tasks at hand. Today we catch an echo of that usage when we say, in everyday English, that the opera singer is devoted to her art and religiously practices Mozart every day. Such examples indicate the dedicated performance of duties regardless of any further and additional Christian monotheistic preoccupation with belief in God or in theistic doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while most English-Latin dictionaries and concordances will consistently define “religion” as “belief in God,” they usually also include this other, quite different sense of the performance of a practice “religiously,” such as “faithfully, strictly, exactly, conscientiously, scrupulously.”20 This meaning decouples the concept from the overdetermined Protestant associations of “religion” with “belief in God,” or “religious practice” with “worship of God,” and shifts the semantic weight to practices in a more inclusive sense. In this sense, the dedicated service of a Roman citizen to Rome, or a contemporary craftswoman to her craft, is not essentially different from the religious dedication of a Christian renouncer to the discipline of his order. They are different practices, and their differences can be specified; but they also share important qualities such as devotion, dedication, treating a practice as sacrosanct, or setting some things apart as special. The populist choreography and democratic liturgy behind the media-framed swearing-in of a new president of the United States are presumably as faithful, strict, exact, conscientious, and scrupulous in their attention to detail as the performance of any Vatican ceremony or any devoted opera singer.
The “Secular” as a Status
For centuries the “secular” referred either to “secular priests” or to civil powers such as the courts. None of these was nonreligious in the modern sense of “secular.” Priests and kings were sacred and anointed by God through the powers of the Church;21 the secular or civil courts, which were distinguished not from the religious courts but from the ecclesiastical courts, were encompassed by Christian Truth, which defined their ends. They served Christ, and cooperated with the ecclesiastical courts in punishing heretics. The “civil” did not have the nuance of the modern “secular,” since even for Luther and Calvin the civil was only relatively profane, was encompassed by Christian Truth, and served the purposes of God. It is significantly different in this context to say that the civil courts of Christendom were separated from the ecclesiastical courts, and to say that the civil was separated from religion. These two distinctions, when placed in their proper context, have different meanings.
Even following the demise of the power of ecclesiastical courts, the procedures of the modern civil courts are highly ritualized, solemn, and invested with a dignity and importance that can be called sacred or sacrosanct without any strain on the ordinary use of language—just as we can say today in ordinary English that the conscientious judge religiously interprets each case according to evidence and precedence.
Christian Truth as Commonweal
Religion understood as Christian Truth was frequently expressed in terms of a sacred order—one could use the anthropological term “ritual order”—sometimes called the Commonweal or Commonwealth. This was based on an analogy with the human body. It was a holistic metaphor. Every limb is necessary for the whole, but some limbs are more important than others: the monarch as the heart, his learned advisors as the head, great soldiers as the arms, laborers as the feet. This was a powerful metaphor, a utopian discourse widely disseminated and fixing hierarchy in the order of things, that is to say, God’s order. Everyone is born into a specific degree, station, and vocation. Duty is sacred. Thus the ritual order of England was sacralized. By serving the king or one’s master, one served God. By serving the whole Body Politic, one served the divine well-being and harmony of God’s Providence.
Analogy Between God, King, and Father
The Commonweal, based on the analogy with the human body, was also an analogy for the Creation: As God is the Dad and Progenitor of All, so the King is the Lord and Head of the Commonweal, and the Father is the Head of the family. The organic metaphor at the level of the Commonweal included church and government, ecclesiastical and temporal, bishop and prince, the spiritualty and the commonalty, and all orders and degrees. All were encompassed by Christian Truth. This was the meaning of Religion. This metaphor legitimated male authority, patriarchy, paternalism, obedience, duty to one’s superiors as part of the natural order. The relatively profane tasks, such as laboring or grave digging, were still sacralized in official rhetoric as God-given duties. The maintenance of pure and prestigious rank was dependent on the pollution-removing offices of the laboring poor. The relative profanity of aspects of the world, which required separation to an acceptable ritual distance, did not amount to the modern “secular” as something dichotomized and separated from an entirely different domain named “religion.” It is therefore in my view necessary to keep the idea of the profane separate from the modern essentialized idea of the secular as the nonreligious.
The Encompassment of Church-State by Religion
The distinction between church and government was not the modern church-state opposition, nor was it the same as the modern distinction between religion and politics. Both church and state were encompassed by Religion. The historian of political theory Quentin Skinner, in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978), argues that the first conception of the State in something like the modern sense was articulated by Jean Bodin in around 1570.22 By this he means that Bodin conceived of the State as an abstract entity in and for itself, and as distinguishable from the person of the king and the older organic idea of the Commonwealth as the king’s body. This, however, cannot be the end of the story, because we do not yet have an idea of “religion” as something in and for itself, as a domain essentially distinct from some other putatively nonreligious domain, even though that idea was possibly at an early stage of emergence. And I argue that until “religion” has also been separated off into a separate, distinct, essentialized domain, we cannot have the modern idea of the secular nonreligious State. We are still looking at a process, the rhetorical construction of modern categories through new discourses that suppress their own recent origins and that claim to be as old as the hills. The illusion of primordial continuity embeds categories in the mythological nature of things.
Politics as “Nonreligious” and Separated from “Religion”: From Where?
The other side of this question is: Where does the idea of politics as essentially nonreligious come from?23 The term “politics” in English occurs before the seventeenth century, but infrequently. A much more usual term was “politic.” Politic (like the words “policy” or “civil”) did not refer to a domain separated from “religion.” The politic body was the well-ordered (Godly) Commonweal. Any action could be described as “politic” if it was appropriate, fitting, useful, and conducive to harmony and good order. It had a nuance also of diplomacy. Henry VIII and his ministers used it to refer to the church rituals of which they approved. This term did not become a discourse on modern politics as “secular” in the sense of “separated from and neutral towards religion” until there also existed a discourse on religion as a discrete domain separate from secular politics.
There is a historical transition from the adjectival “politic” to the noun “politics” especially around the later seventeenth century. Two examples of influential late-seventeenth-century rhetorical reformulations of the meaning of “religion” and the invention of modern politics as a distinct domain were William Penn and John Locke. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania and writer of early liberal constitutions, urged on his readers the following:
Religion and Policy, or Christianity and Magistracy, are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other; the one is for purifying, and cleaning the soul, and fitting it for a future state; the other is for Maintenance and Preserving of Civil Society, in order to the outward conveniency and accommodation of men in this World. A Magistrate is a true and real Magistrate, though not a Christian; as well as a man is a true and real Christian, without being a Magistrate.24
Here we can clearly see a distinctly new rhetoric of the essential difference between religion and policy, a word that is at this time beginning to become interchangeable with politics. For Penn is rhetorically constructing a notion of religion as private, individual, concerned with the next life, and “policy” or “magistracy” as concerned with a distinct public domain of civil society.
Similarly John Locke,25 in his A Letter Concerning Toleration, argued:
I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the Business of Civil Government from that of Religion, and to settle the just Bounds that lie between the one and the other. If this be not done, there can be no end put to the Controversies that will be always arising, between those that have, or at least pretend to have, on the one side, a Concernment for the Interest of Mens Souls, and on the other side, a Care of the Commonwealth.… The Commonwealth seems to me to be a Society of Men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing of their own Civil Interests. Civil Interests I call Life, Liberty, Health, and Indolency of Body; and the possession of outward things, such as Money, Lands, Houses, Furniture, and the like.26
The duty of the Civil Magistrate “by the impartial Execution of equal Laws” is to defend through the fear of punishment and the possession of force “the civil interests of his Subjects.”
Locke seeks to persuade his readers—and himself—that “the whole Jurisdiction of the Magistrate reaches only to these civil Concernments … it neither can nor ought in any manner to be extended to the Salvation of Souls.”27
All the Power of Civil Government relates only to Men’s Civil Interests; is confined to the care of the things of this World; and hath nothing to do with the World to come.… A Church I … take to be a voluntary Society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the publick worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the Salvation of their Souls.28
The church is a free and voluntary society; no one can inherit religion from their parents in the way that “Temporal Estates” are inherited; it is purely individual, voluntary, to do with inner belief and salvation. If the individual makes an error of judgment, he is free to leave that church or sect and join another. We can see clearly here the rhetorical construction of “religion” and “politics” (also referred to as civil society or the magistracy) as essentially different in terms of ends and purposes, organization, and functions.
Furthermore, one is private and the other public. Both Penn and Locke influenced the development of state charters and constitutions.
Benjamin Hoadly was an Anglican bishop who was frequently cited and quoted in American radical pamphlets, especially his The Original and Institution of Civil Government, Discuss’d and The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider’d. In Defence of the Doctrine. Deliver’d in a Sermon Preach’d Before the Rt. Hon. the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, Sept. 29, 1705.29 In these works, Hoadly pursues a distinction between religion and the polity that is close to the kind being argued by Penn and Locke. For example, he directly attacks what he calls the Patriarchal Scheme of Government, referring implicitly to Filmer, whom Locke critiqued in his first Treatise.30 Bernard Bailyn says in his The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) that Hoadly “was widely held to be one of the most notable figures in the history of political thought” in the colonies.31 This is another indication of the importance of the colonization of America in the formation and clarification of this modern ideological construct. Locke, Penn, and Hoadly were among the most often cited and quoted theorists in North America in the eighteenth century, and influenced the state charters, the bills of rights, and the various constitutions, which fed into the US Constitution of 1789–90. Bailyn, after reviewing specific instances of the influence of the Constitution globally, concludes that, “in the generations that have followed, that influence has remained pervasive—not merely in the design of specific constitutions but mainly and increasingly, as America’s power has grown, in its embodiment of established western values.”32
I have suggested that the success of the modern discourse on religion and religions as a special kind of human practice essentially distinct from nonreligious ones has a significant connection to the history of European colonialism and the birth of capitalism. The myth of “religion” as an essentially private inner experience or special psychological state derives in part from some forms of Protestant Christianity, though today it is also a commodity for consumption.33 But the development of those forms of Protestant Christianity, particularly nonconformist groups, is not self-evident or merely generated internally from some inherent logic of abstract ideas. As the concept of elective affinity suggests, ideas have to be adaptable to the actual interests of emergent classes and their practices for them to survive and prosper. The essentialization of “religious” as distinct from “secular” practices can partly be understood in terms of a dialectical relation with new powerful interests in banking, trading, and manufacturing, with the transformation of land-use rights into private property, and with the commodification of human beings in the forms of slavery or wage labor. The crucial connection is the clothing of faith in capital with an aura of factuality such that, in contrast to religion, the workings of capital and commodity markets can appear to be part of rational knowledge rather than the blind faith of superstition. This process entailed a radical transformation of the old status quo. In this sense we can see the US Constitution as a dominant ritual proclamation that embeds white, male, literate, Europhone categories and rationality as being in the nature of things. Women and men who today turn this wheel of “religion” are unknowingly pump-priming the (male) myth of this paradigmatic discourse on the unavoidable operations of capitalism.
It might be, and sometimes is, argued that this modern ideology is not wholly bad. The development of an ideology of interiority has not resulted only in the shallow individualism of consumer capital and the exploitation of vulnerable people as machines for the extraction of surplus value. It has (arguably) also offered less powerful people such as women and subjugated minorities a significant space to be treated with respect and dignity as human beings, providing some protection against the quantitative exploitation of their material productive power. Constitutional rights have also historically and to some degree provided a space for labor to unionize for the promotion of the common good of the working classes. It is, however, essential to notice (as many feminists, subaltern theorists, and labor historians have pointed out) that constitutional human rights legislation is mainly the invention of white wealthy literate males who owned slaves, switched to wage labor as more economical and profitable, and continue to pursue ambitious and lucrative careers on such grounds as that greed is good, wage labor is a fact of life, and lending money for interest is naturally rational and has nothing inherently to do with moral values—in short, that the secular state and politics were invented to “other” (render marginal) a range of powerful moral discourses in order to more effectively represent and protect the interests and privileges of male private property.
It is on these kinds of grounds that I argue that the category “religion” is complex, is unstable, and holds contradictory meanings, making its supposedly neutral and disinterested employment for analytical and descriptive purposes illusory and dangerous. Religion discourse is deeply ideological, all the more so for being disguised and mystified as neutral, as merely descriptive, or as intellectually satisfying.
NOTES
This chapter was written several years ago when this book was in an early stage of production. Since then I have developed the argument in a range of publications, including a monograph, Religion and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (London: Continuum, 2011); an edited volume, Trevor Stack, Naomi Goldenberg, and T. Fitzgerald, eds., Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Leiden: Brill, 2015); and several articles and book chapters. See, for a recent example, “ ‘Postcolonial Remains’: Critical Religion, Postcolonial Theory, and Deconstructing Modern Categories,” in The Postcolonial World, ed. Jyotsna Singh and David Kim (London: Routledge, 2016).
1. Richard King and Jeremy Carrette, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005).
2. Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). I am not concerned with the etymology of the terms but with the way they have been used historically in a range of discourses. For example, much has been made of the derivation of “religion” from religio; but I am not convinced that in either Roman Latin or Medieval Latin religio had the same usage and meaning; and both of these were different from early modern “Religion” in post-Reformation Holland, Germany, France, and England. This early modern usage, while still deployed, has been largely superseded by a distinctly modern discourse on religion and religions. I have traced typical usages of these terms since the late sixteenth century in England in Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. William T. Cavanaugh has provided an important analysis of the different meanings and usages of these terms in The Myth of Religious Violence.
3. See Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 72–97.
4. I use the singular expression “a category such as religion and secular” deliberately, to indicate a mutually parasitic binary, in order to problematize the idea that “religion” and the “nonreligious secular” are two separate categories, discreet and independent of each other. These categories are rhetorically deployed as if they refer to essentially different things, domains, or concepts. This is an ideological illusion.
5. Jonathan Fox, “The Rise of Religious Nationalism and Conflict: Ethnic Conflict and Revolutionary Wars, 1945–2001,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 6 (November 2004): 716–17.
6. Ibid., 715–31.
7. Mark Jeuergensmeyer is a major promoter of this myth; see, for example, Mark Jeuergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). And more recently Mark Jeuergensmeyer, “Is Religion the Problem?,” Hedgehog Review 6, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1–10.
8. Arvind Pal Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
9. For an interesting analysis of the coexistence of nationalism with skepticism about the existence of the nation, see G. Aloysius, Nationalism Without a Nation in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
10. See Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity.
11. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence, passim; Fitzgerald, Religion and Politics in International Relations, passim.
12. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
13. Quoted in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 5.
14. R. H. Robert and J. M. M. Good, The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 4.
15. Michael Cahn, “The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: Six Tropes of Disciplinary Self-Constitution,” in Roberts and Good, The Recovery of Rhetoric, 61–84.
16. See Fitzgerald, “ ‘Postcolonial Remains.’ ”
17. For a detailed historicization of religio and religion, see Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence.
18. Samuel Purchas, Purchas, His Pilgrimage; Or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages (London, 1626); analyzed in Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity, chap. 7.
19. William Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1962); S. N. Balagangadhara, “The Heathen in His Blindness”: Asia, the West, and the Dynamic of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999); Timothy Fitzgerald, ed., Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations (London: Equinox, 2007).
20. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “religion” and “religiously.”
21. This point still holds with the 1953 coronation liturgy of the present Queen of England.
22. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 352–53; see a discussion in Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity, 149–50.
23. The same question can be asked about “political economy” or “economics,” for example.
24. William Penn, The Great Question to Be Considered by the King, and This Approaching Parliament, Briefly Proposed, and Modestly Discussed: (To Wit) How Far Religion Is Concerned in Policy or Civil Government, and Policy in Religion? (London, 1680), National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Microfiche, 4.
25. My argument seems to converge in some respects with that of Jakob de Roover and S. N. Balagangadhara, “The Secular State and Religious Conflict: Liberal Neutrality and the Indian Case of Pluralism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2007): 67–92.
26. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 2nd ed. (London, 1689), 8–9.
27. Ibid., 9.
28. Ibid., 13.
29. Benjamin Hoadly, The Measures of Submission to the Civil Magistrate Consider’d: In Defence of the Doctrine. Deliver’d in a Sermon Preach’d Before the Rt. Hon. the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of London, Sept. 29, 1705 (London, 1710); Benjamin Hoadly, The Original and Institution of Civil Government, Discuss’d, 2nd ed. (London, 1710).
30. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarchy, and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
31. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 37.
32. Bernard Bailyn, American Constitutionalism: Atlantic Dimensions (London: Institute of United States Studies, University of London, 2002), 25.
33. Jeremy Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy (London: Routledge, 2007); Carrette and King, Selling Spirituality.