The return of religion or the end of religion? On the need to rethink religion as a category of social and political life

Philosophy and the turn to religion

In the 20th century, Western philosophy’s confrontation with religion in several ways reached a climax. The critical discourse for which the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers lay the base, and which was refined in the 19th century by thinkers such as Marx and Nietzsche, took on a more unrelenting tone by the mid-20th century. To be sure, Marx and Nietzsche were at times relentless in their critique of religion, but always with a sense for the complexity of the phenomenon they were critiquing. Hence Marx famously conceded that religion, despite its destructive effects, nevertheless was the ‘heart of a heartless world’. ³ Similarly, after having launched a merciless satirical attack on the Christian notion of God, Nietzsche could exclaim: ‘how differently, how extraordinarily, has the divine at each occasion revealed itself to me!’ ⁴

Half a century later, there is little left of Nietzsche’s vitalism or his poking fun of those ‘pale atheists’ who have merely substituted Christian asceticism for an obsessive quest for rationalist purity. To the contrary, the quest for rational pureness is a hallmark of much 20th-century criticism of religion, be it in the form of Bertrand Russell’s analytical endeavour or Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist confrontation with the remnants of Christian faith. In both cases, the tone is unwavering: religious faith is described as unhealthy, theology’s status as an academic discipline is contested, and religious institutions are relegated to the private sphere.

Needless to say, the image painted here could be made more compound. Just by the time the modernist criticism of religion reached its peak, a more benign interest in religion began to emerge in other parts of the European philosophical discourse. The most emblematic figure in this respect is, arguably, Martin Heidegger. Notwithstanding his at times inexorable attitude towards traditional religious ideas, ⁵ Heidegger’s phenomenological and hermeneutical reflections on theological core issues incited a new philosophical approach to religion which later reverberated in thinkers as different as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo and Eugenio Trías. A similar ambivalence with regard to religion can be discerned in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later writings, which gave essential impulses to subsequent British philosophy of religion, with DZ Phillips as the probably most prominent name.

To make the picture even more compound, the truth is, of course, that philosophy’s ambivalence with regard to religion has been there all along. While the proponents of the French Enlightenment were driven by a strongly anticlerical pathos, the agenda was partly reversed when the Enlightenment reached German soil. In contrast to the Encyclopédistes, who opposed religion in the name of reason, the major proponents of the German Aufklärung sought to reconcile religion with reason by incorporating religion into their own rational discourses. Perhaps most clearly manifested in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, the same ambivalence can be discerned among the Romantic philosophers, as well as in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and eventually Heidegger. When in the 1990s the talk of a ‘return of religion’ became widespread in European and American philosophy, it was therefore not so surprising that this happened predominantly among thinkers situated in this particular Wirkungsgeschichte. I am referring here, not least, to the famous symposium on religion which took place on the island of Capri in 1994, and which involved, among others, Derrida, Gadamer, Vattimo and Trías.

Against this background, it becomes clear that the ‘return of religion’ in parts of Western philosophy was less about a return, and more about a self-critical discovery that philosophy had never severed the ties to its theological past (why de Vries’s term ‘the turn to religion’ is more apt than ‘the return of religion’). In this respect, there is a parallel to the self-critical process that sociology went through during the same years, recognizing that religion had not, as previously asserted, been in constant decline throughout Western modernity, but rather migrated and taken on new shapes. ⁶ The question that remains to be pondered, however, is what in the first place prompted philosophy as well as sociology to reconsider their approach to religion by the end of the 20th century. I shall speak here only for philosophy, although the factors behind the similar developments in the two disciplines converge.

One reason has to do with the fact that religion did become visible in a new manner during the last decades of the 20th century. As a consequence of increased migration and changed demographical patterns, religious practices and attributes other than the culturally inherited began to appear in societies that had long conceived of themselves as thoroughly secular. This new visibility of religion could also be linked to the emergence of modern fundamentalism from the 1970s and onwards, including the increasing attention it began to attract in Western media in the wake of the Rushdie affair of 1989. These various factors were clearly present in the discussions of the 1994 Capri symposium. Hence, the return of religion in the form of violence and extremism was a recurring motif, but also religion as a potentially constructive force in the building of the new Europe that was about to emerge in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern bloc. ⁷

A second reason to the renewed philosophical interest in religion has to do with what is sometimes termed the ‘post-political condition’. Already in the Capri discussions, which bore obvious traces of the post-1989 mood, there was a clear sense that the grand political visions of the past century – for better or worse – had come to an end. ⁸ Instead, several of the interlocutors pointed to religious traditions as potential resources for promoting discourses of justice able to reach beyond and even to challenge existing political orders. In recent decades, this interest in the radical political potential of especially the biblical inheritance has grown, even as social and economic inequality has been on constant rise. One can here think of radical left-wing thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou or Slavoj Žižek, who have all turned to the messianic strand of the biblical legacy in order to challenge prevailing notions of political and economic liberalism. Other examples worthy of mention include social liberals such as Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor, who have both pointed to religion as an invaluable resource for democratic discourses about the common good. ⁹

A third reason to philosophy’s ‘turn to religion’ could be linked to theoretical and methodological developments within the discipline itself. Increased hermeneutical awareness and general epistemological developments have simply rendered the premises of the modernist criticism of religion less plausible. An emblematic expression of this shift was Richard Rorty’s recognition, by the end of his life, that he no longer considered atheism to be an intellectually viable position: ‘Neither those who affirm nor those who deny the existence of God can plausibly claim that they have evidence for their views’. ¹⁰ Another expression of this shift is the rather lukewarm and sometimes even derisive reception by academic scholars of the so called new atheist literature, which by and large repeats the arguments of high modernist criticism of religion. One may here think, for instance, of Terry Eagleton’s sharp and witty polemic against Richard Dawkins’s and Christopher Hitchens’s outdated notion of rationality in his 2009 essay Reason, Faith, and Revolution. ¹¹

The legitimacy crisis of ‘religion’

While philosophers in the past 25 years have paid increasing attention to religion, there has simultaneously been a growing unease with the very premises for speaking about religion as a universal human phenomenon. Already at the Capri symposium, Derrida posed the rhetorical question whether it is not the case that merely by pronouncing the word ‘religion’ we are already ‘speaking Latin’. He thereby subtly suggested that the very idea of a truly universal religion, both in its origin and its purpose, is and will remain Christian in the broader sense of the word. ¹²

It is not insignificant in this context that Derrida, unlike the other participants, spoke partly from a Jewish position (he was, incidentally, also the only participant who explicitly drew attention to the fact that no representative of a Muslim tradition was present, despite Islam being a recurring topic in the discussions). A decade ago, the British-Jewish scholar Brian Klug in a similar way pointed to the deficiencies of the concept of religion in his thoughtful essay Offence: The Jewish Case. Klug set out by reminding his readers that the concept of religion is found neither in the Hebrew Bible nor in the Talmud. It was only in the late Middle Ages, when both Christianity and Islam had emerged, that Jewish theologians were confronted with the concept and prompted to consider their own tradition as a religion. Nonetheless, the larger culture in Europe was and remained dominated by Christianity (or, rather, Christendom), which meant that the very form in which the concept of religion was moulded was inherently Christian:

It is partly on account of this problem that I hesitate to call Judaism a ‘religion’. For, even to the extent that it makes sense to apply the word to Judaism, it does not necessarily make the same sense that it makes when it is applied to Christianity: the one ‘religion’ is organized around the notion of peoplehood, the other around the concept of a church. A similar complication arises with calling Judaism a ‘faith’. ¹³

However, it is not only Jewish thinkers who have questioned the cultural and historical bias of the concept of religion. Over the past few decades, a plethora of critical studies of the ideological undertones of the concept has been published by, among others, William Arnal, Talal Asad, Carlin Barton, Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Dubuisson, Timothy Fitzgerald, Gavin Flood, Tomoko Masuzawa, Russel McCutcheon, Brent Nongbri and Jonathan Z Smith. ¹⁵ None of these thinkers are philosophers in the strict sense. Instead, they are anthropologists and historians of religion who use philosophical tools (deconstruction, genealogy, discourse analysis, etc.) in new and pathbreaking ways.

Tomoko Masuzawa’s much debated The Invention of World Religions from 2005 may serve as an illustrative example. Through a critical genealogy of the particular discursive practice within which the idea of ‘world religions’ first appeared, Masuzawa explores how this idea evolved as part of the formation of modern European identity in the 19th century. She initially draws attention to the role played by the emerging social sciences – sociology, economics and political science – in forging the notion of Europe as a harbinger of universal history. Symptomatically, these ‘secular’ disciplines came into existence just as European societies on various levels struggled to sever the bonds with church authority. In this way, she argues, they became

effective ways of understanding European society because this society had finally reached maturity, that is, had sufficiently developed in accordance with rational principles and established itself on the basis of the rule of law, instead of on some real or imagined supernatural authority. ¹⁶

It is as part of this particular discursive constellation – which also includes the discipline of ‘comparative theology’, the new sciences of language, and, last but not least, a growing fascination with race – that the concept of world religions emerges, and thereby the idea of religion as a universal phenomenon to be found anywhere in the world at any time in history. What Masuzawa specifically wishes to highlight is the fact that religion, by the time it acquired the meaning it still has today,

came to be recognized above all as something that, in the opinions of many self-consciously modern Europeans, was in the process of disappearing from their midst, or if not altogether disappearing, becoming circumscribed in such a way that it was finally discernible as a distinct, and limited, phenomenon. ¹⁸

To be sure, there are questions to be raised about the kind of far-reaching claims that Masuzawa puts forth in her analysis. Nevertheless, she draws attention to something important, namely how the modern concept of religion from the moment of its birth is interwoven with the emerging discourse of secularism. ¹⁹ The division of labour between the newly founded academic disciplines is in this respect revealing. While customs and practices in European societies were increasingly being analysed in political and economic – that is ‘secular’ – terms, corresponding phenomena in non-European societies were described as expressions of religion or even superstition. In this way, European scholars were not only projecting onto other cultures what they imagined themselves to have left behind, thereby portraying those cultures as belonging to an earlier evolutionary stage. In conceptualizing the world as divided between religious and secular, they were also projecting a distinction that simply did not make sense to any other culture than the European before this time in history.

If the division of the world into a religious and a secular sphere did not make sense to non-Western cultures until those cultures first encountered European Christians, it did not make sense to Europeans either until, roughly speaking, the 19th century. To be sure, there have been distinctions between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ or between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ in ancient and medieval culture, but not in a way which corresponds to the modern distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ (ancient Jewish purity rituals, to name but one example, involved an array of aspects of mundane life that went far beyond what modern people would describe as religious). Even when the distinction religiosus/saecularis first appeared in late medieval Latin, it did not refer to what the dichotomy later came to denote, but rather to what would today be perceived as an intra-religious distinction, namely the division between clergy men who belonged to monastic orders and those who did not (a terminology which is still in use in the Catholic church).

In addition to the post-colonial studies carried out by scholars such as Masuzawa, Talal Asad, Daniel Dubuisson and Timothy Fitzgerald, the past decade has seen a growing interest also in this kind of anachronistic difficulties that arise when the modern concept of religion is projected back onto historical texts and artefacts. Here, in particular, the recent studies by Carlin Barton, Daniel Boyarin and Brent Nongbri deserve mentioning. While Barton and Boyarin engage in a close reading of the Latin and Greek words religio and thrēskeia – both of which are regularly mistranslated as ‘religion’ – Nongbri, in his celebrated Before Religion, takes a broader view and poses the more general question of what happens when we force earlier cultures into the Procrustean bed of concepts and distinctions that we use to organize our modern world. ²⁰ Even in those cases where there is an earlier concept which in certain respects overlaps with our modern word ‘religion’ (which is far from always the case, ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, as already mentioned, simply have no word that is routinely translated as ‘religion’), it is still not this particular concept of religion. Above all, the modern concept of religion and the notion of being religious require the accompanying notions of the secular and of not being religious – and this dichotomy was, as already stated, foreign to earlier cultures. Nongbri neatly summarizes:

More generally, it has become clear that the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life ideally separated from politics, economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. In fact, in the broad view of human cultures, it is a strikingly odd way of conceiving the world. In the ancient world, the gods were involved in all aspects of life. That is not to say, however, that all ancient people were somehow uniformly ‘religious’; rather, the act of distinguishing between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ is a recent development. Ancient people simply did not carve up the world in that way. ²¹

‘Religion’ after all? Philosophical responses to the critique

In light of the growing critique against the very category of religion, one may fairly ask whether the concept today does more harm than good. Should we, then, simply stop using the term ‘religion’? Some of the scholars mentioned above, notably Daniel Dubuisson and Timothy Fitzgerald, seem to come to this conclusion. I am, for my part, less convinced about the desirability, let alone possibility, of leaving the concept behind, which might be due to the fact that I began my academic career in linguistics (long before I ended up in that gloomy office at the department of religious studies). As a student of linguistics, you gain, among other things, a deep respect for the inherent power of language: no matter how much we strive to master and control language, it will always live and thrive quite independently of such efforts. There is simply something presumptuous about the idea that academic scholars would be in a position to abolish a concept so deeply engrained in both popular and academic consciousness. With that said, I do contend that we (‘we’ referring here to scholars of religion of various disciplines) should work hard to raise the critical awareness about the flaws and deficiencies that adhere to the concept of religion as it is commonly understood and used in contemporary education, media reporting and in society at large.

All of which brings me back to the discipline of philosophy. In the past century, Western philosophy, generally speaking, went from a sceptical or even dismissive attitude towards religion to a more affirmative and enquiring approach, epitomized in the so called ‘turn to religion’ among predominantly continental philosophers. However, both before and after this shift, most philosophical discourses have assumed a fairly traditional concept of religion, ‘traditional’ referring precisely to the view that has been questioned in recent historical and anthropological research. If this applies to philosophy in general, it also applies to that particular subdiscipline of philosophy that goes by the title ‘philosophy of religion’. Usually located in departments of religious studies, the discipline contains a mixture of strongly critical and more affirmative or even apologetic voices with regard to religion as a phenomenon. However, as Kevin Schilbrack has argued, both camps have long nurtured an idea of the task of philosophy of religion that is at once narrow, intellectualist and insular. It is narrow in the sense that it engages primarily with questions that are engendered by Christianity or even Protestantism and not by religion in a broader sense. Typical topics of research have been assessments of arguments for or against God’s existence, the rationality of faith propositions or the semantic value of religious language. In this narrow focus on the doctrinal dimensions of religion – at the expense of the ethical, political and ritual aspects through which most religious people understand and articulate their faith – philosophy of religion is also intellectualist. Finally, it is insular, in the sense that it draws little from and contributes little to other disciplines in the study of religion (and, one might add, to other disciplines in general). Hence, most philosophers of religion still seem to have taken little account of the critical historical, genealogical and post-colonial issues that have been raised with regard to the concept of religion in the past decades. ²²

While that can be said about philosophers in general, it does not, however, apply to Schilbrack himself. One of the many merits of his much debated 2014 ‘manifesto’, Philosophy and the Study of Religions, is his effort to engage, as a philosopher, with the critical arguments developed by anthropologists and historians of religions in the past decades. ²³ Schilbrack rehearses the critique of authors such as Asad, Dubuisson and Fitzgerald and concurs with the main thrust of their argument: the unreflective but still common notion of religion as a stable category which could be applied to describe supposedly universal phenomena throughout history and around the world is simply untenable. Equally, Schilbrack credits these authors for bringing attention to the fact that the term religion, as a product of European modernity, is weighted with connotations that in many cases tend to distort our understanding of what people do and think, historically as well as in the present. ²⁴

Having recognized these aspects, we are left with two options: either we can drop the term religion and develop new terms, or we can refine the existing term. For a number of reasons, Schilbrack opts for the second alternative. One reason for not giving up the term religion is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a replacement that is not as historically and culturally biased as the term it is supposed to replace. Schilbrack exemplifies with Dubuisson’s proposal that we replace religion with the ‘all-encompassing’ category of ‘cosmographic formation’. ²⁵ While this may indeed be a useful term in studying what has traditionally been conceived as religion, there are nonetheless doubts to be raised about its supposedly universal character:

The notion of cosmographic formation is made of two elements, the idea that all things can be imagined as a totality (kosmos) and the practice of writing (graphein), both of Greek origin and both of which have been widely used as the markers of European superiority to non-European cultures. ²⁶

Another reason for not giving up the term religion is precisely the acknowledgement that it is a social and historical construction. As such, it can be deconstructed, refined and brought to new critical uses in the future. Arguably, such a deconstructive process has been going on for a long time in the many 20th-century efforts to rid the category of religion of its Christian assumptions in order to render it more generally applicable. ²⁷ The critical question that is being raised today, not only by Schilbrack, is whether such efforts to de Christianize the concept of religion are not to some extent futile. This was, as already indicated, Derrida’s concern when reminding the interlocutors of the Capri symposium that merely in pronouncing the word religion we are already ‘speaking Latin’. Interestingly, similar concerns are expressed in more recent studies by historians of religion, notably in Nongbri’s After Religion. In contrast to Dubuisson and Fitzgerald, Nongbri describes the various efforts that are being made to produce ‘more cross-culturally valid’ definitions of religion as misguided. Instead he stresses the importance of critically assuming the fact that the concept of religion has its origins in a particular Christian discourse: ‘Future efforts to deploy the category of religion will need to own up to its somewhat checkered past and generate creative ways of using the category while acknowledging its roots as a relic of Christian polemics’. ²⁸ Rather than cementing an imperial attitude – to refer to a common reproach against definitions of religion that recognize or even reclaim the theological roots of the concept – Nongbri seems to suggest that a critical awareness of the Christian (or even Protestant) bias of the category of religion in reality makes us more likely to use the concept in a careful and responsible way. The problem, after all, is not anachronism or the fact that the concept of religion has a particular history that, among many other things, is intricately interwoven with secularism. The problem is when we use the concept, intentionally or not, as if this was not the case. ²⁹

It is noteworthy that Schilbrack as a philosopher of religion and Nongbri as a historian of religion seem to come to very similar conclusions as regards the continuing deployment of the term religion. This is also the case when they address the concrete question of how the study of religion should move forward. Both call for an increased critical awareness among scholars of religion and both suggest that we distinguish between ‘descriptive’ and ‘redescriptive’ usages of the term religion. In other words, we need to recognize that ‘religion’ is not a universally applicable first-order concept that we can use to identify phenomena around the world and throughout history, no matter whether the concept matches the native discursive fields of the cultures in question. Having recognized this, however, we may still use it as a second-order interpretative concept while being explicit that we are doing so. Schilbrack exemplifies with the practice of honouring the ancestors in a given culture. While the participants in this practice may not themselves have a concept equivalent to the term religion, it may still be useful for a scholar to redescribe or interpret the practice as a form of religion. The distinction between identifying and interpreting is here crucial, because it allows scholars to be critically aware of the limitations of their approach:

An interpretation is open to challenge as an interpretation and therefore those who interpret, unlike those who describe, have to be able to give reasons in support of their labels. And so the distinction between describing or identifying on the one hand and redescribing or interpreting on the other opens up a space for challenge and highlights the fact that the meaning of ‘religion’ is not self-evident. ³⁰

Assessing the debate

Let me return now to the tension I depicted at the outset between philosophical discourses on the one hand, and historical and anthropological ones on the other. Are the various academic discourses on religion in reality that isolated from each other? Yes and no. I think it is fair to say that many philosophical discourses on religion still operate with a rather rudimentary concept of religion, even as much research conducted within anthropology and history of religion suffers from a lack of critical philosophical and hermeneutical awareness. ³³ That said, theoretical developments within both fields are moving rapidly, something to which all the scholars referred to above testify. In particular, the approaches of Schilbrack and Nongbri can be seen as the result of a productive theoretical interaction between the various fields. Against this background, it is interesting to look closer at the theoretical differences that nonetheless exist between these two thinkers. To be sure, Schilbrack and Nongbri are only two particular voices and as such far from representative of their disciplines in general. Nonetheless, I think the differences between them to some extent are indicative of more general tendencies that characterize the various disciplines.

As already shown, Schilbrack and Nongbri both endorse a social constructivist position with regard to the concept of religion. However, to anticipate a point to which I shall come back in a while, such a position can be staged in various ways depending on how one views the relation between ontology and epistemology. In the present debate, these variations come to a head in the question as to whether the phenomena referred to as ‘religion’ exist independently of the concepts we use to redescribe or interpret them. If a given culture lacks the concept of religion – as we have seen that most cultures outside the modern West did – is it then reasonable to claim that this culture includes what we label ‘religion’ as some sort of extralinguistic reality? Nongbri, for his part, adopts a radical cultural–linguistic approach and rebuts the idea of religion as a thing ‘out there’ for the scholar to disclose in the form of particular experiences or phenomena. For the sake of my subsequent argument, I shall quote him at length on this point:

Even authors who argue against the universality of religion often still appear to posit the existence of some sort of universal, extralinguistic thing (call it faith, religious experience, religiosity, experience of the sacred) that transcends any language that attempts to describe it. This sort of thinking can lead to the following kinds of claims: ‘Even though they have no words for it, maybe the ancient Greeks were religious. Maybe they did have religious experiences. They just lacked the words to describe them’. Such appeals to ‘experience’ are problematic for a variety of reasons. All experiences that enter the field of discussion are, by definition, put into words. Strictly speaking, people who claim to study religious experience are actually studying narratives of experiences. One sometimes encounters the claim that there are ‘raw experiences’ that are universal and only appear distinct because the experiences are ‘translated’ into different languages that are culturally conditioned. Those who make such assertions must presume to have direct access to the experience itself, to be able to have privileged access to ‘get behind’ the language. ³⁴

Turning now to Schilbrack, he explicitly rejects Nongbri’s radical cultural–linguistic position and instead argues for a critical realist approach: ‘My goal is to keep in mind the critics’ awareness that religion is a social construction without giving up the possibility that the thing which the term refers nevertheless exists’. ³⁶ The acknowledgement that the concept of religion is a product of the modern Western imaginaire, in other words, need not lead us to the conclusion that the word is substantively empty or has no referent in history. On the contrary, it is precisely the assumption that the word ‘religion’ refers to real features of the world that makes it possible to argue that certain interpretations may indeed distort our understanding of those features. From such a perspective, it is also fully legitimate to speak of religion as a feature in ancient cultures. To be sure, ancient Greeks or Romans did not see the world as 19th-century Europeans did, nor did they conceive what they were doing as religious. But unless we collapse the epistemic and the ontological levels of the argument, we may still contend that the modern concept of religion actually made it possible to discern features and structures of those cultures that had hitherto not been reflected on, although they had been there. ³⁷ If this is the case with ancient cultures, it also goes for the encounter with non-Western cultures throughout modernity:

From the realist perspective, it is not the case that Europeans simply imposed the concept onto non-western cultures regardless of the structure of those cultures. Instead, there was a dialectical give and take between non-European practices (which, as data, were taken as difficult, challenging, and incongruous) and western theorizing about them. One can see the emergence of the modern sense of the word ‘religion’ not as the imposition of a tool that Europe already had, but rather as the product of conflict between inherited categories and the facts about the new world. ³⁸

At this point one is tempted to ask whether Nongbri would actually object to any of this. He does after all not deny that there is a material reality of social practices and forms of life ‘out there’ to study, only that these practices or forms of life could ever be reflected on independently of our concepts – a statement with which Schilbrack explicitly concurs. ⁴¹ And yet there is an important difference in nuance between Schilbrack’s persistent realism and Nongbri’s stronger emphasis on the constitutive role of language in our approach to reality. As a springboard for my critical discussion in the concluding part of this article, I would like to specify my own position by placing myself in the space between these two perspectives.

On the one hand, I share Nongbri’s misgivings about ‘the energy spent on trying to produce a “good definition” of religion or to trying to decide whether or not something “really is” a religion’, ⁴² and want to heed his call to instead shift focus to the acts of naming some phenomena or practices as religion and others as not religion. This is not to say that definitions are insignificant. As Schilbrack rightly points out, a critical realist account of religion has to stipulate a generic definition of what the term is taken to refer to. Such a definition may not be identical to the colloquial sense of the term, nor does it have to be static. But precisely to avoid – or at least to minimize – the conceptual violence involved when retrojecting ‘religion’ on past cultures or projecting it onto non-Western cultures, the scholar should be transparent about what she is seeking to discover. ⁴³ However, while I basically agree with this argument, it seems to me that Schilbrack is somewhat too confident that if only we play with open cards and account for our stipulated definitions, then we can safely proceed with our scientific inquiries. But declaring that our definitions are stipulated and that our concepts are theoretical constructs is not sufficient. We also need to ponder the implicit assumptions of our definitions and the ways in which we apply them: What parameters influence the selection of what we choose to define as religion in the first place? Are there specific motifs that shape our interpretation of the selected phenomena? And what are the ideological consequences of our stipulated definitions in terms of new exclusions or forced inclusions?

On the other hand, while I do acclaim Nongbri’s suggestion that we place focus on what is at stake in the use of a particular definition of religion rather than trying to define a purported essence of religion, I do not share his radical cultural–linguistic approach more generally (and hence concur with Schilbrack’s critical realism). Abandoning the idea of religion as a universal and timeless phenomenon need not lead us to the conclusion that human experience, agency and cognition – all of which are at stake in the study of religion – are always and inescapably imprisoned by language and that it therefore does not make sense to speak of religious experience. However, this is precisely the stance Nongbri endorses, rejecting not only the idea of religious experience but of any form of extralinguistic experience – including what is sometimes called ‘raw experiences’. ⁴⁴ I take this rather extreme position as symptomatic of the field of research in which Nongbri is involved. As Gavin Flood remarked in his landmark study Beyond Phenomenology (1999), large swathes of the research carried out in religious studies have up to the present date been premised on the ideal of the detached scholar who looks for timeless, trans-subjective structures that could give us an unbiased understanding of various ‘religious phenomena’. ⁴⁵ As this approach has successively been abandoned, many scholars tend to end up in the other extreme, moving from implicit assumptions about an ahistorical subjectivity to the assumption that there is no subjectivity at all beyond our linguistic constructs. It is in this light that I read Nongbri’s rejection even of the claim that there are emotional raw experiences that are universal and recognizable to humans over cultural and linguistic borders. I shall come back to the question of experience in my conclusion, but let me for the time being only state that I believe that philosophy in general – and Schilbrack is in this respect representative – offers a much more reflected and nuanced discussion of human experience (which might be due the fact that it has been grappling with the ‘linguistic turn’ for at least a century) than the one found within parts of contemporary anthropology and history of religion. ⁴⁶

Rethinking religion as a category of social and political life

To summarize the theoretical developments dealt with so far: while anthropologists and historians have done an important work in revealing the cultural and ideological bias of the modern concept of religion, I think the response from philosophers like Schilbrack has contributed to render the discussion more stringent and rigorous. As another philosopher of religion, Thomas Lynch, has recently remarked, scholars of religion increasingly agree that religion is a socially constructed category, but the reflection on the exact nature of this claim is often underdeveloped. ⁴⁷ Schilbrack has in this respect done a significant work in clarifying that a social constructivist approach, for example, does not necessarily stand in opposition to a realist account of religion. Lynch, for his part, wishes to reinforce Schilbrack’s argument by showing how philosophical work on social construction in relation to race and gender can shed further light on the category of religion. Among other things, recent critical work on race and gender points to the significance of not playing out social constructivism and realism against each other. As Sally Haslanger has argued, it is precisely the fact that socially constructed categories are real and material that make them so powerful: race and gender are not only mental constructions, but inscribed in legal documents, institutions and buildings in ways that concretely affect the lives of innumerable people. However, this is not to say that they are necessary or unchangeable. The argument of social constructivism amounts precisely to claiming that certain categories are real but nevertheless contingent, and therefore could, and in some cases should, be changed. ⁴⁸

It is on the basis of these critical observations that Lynch seeks to develop an understanding of the social construction of religion that moves beyond the methodological issues that preoccupy Schilbrack. While Schilbrack, as already indicated, contents himself with admitting that religion is a socially constructed category, Lynch goes further and explores the potentially detrimental effects of this category as it is deployed in contemporary social and political life. ⁴⁹ It is precisely on this point that the question of the ontological status of the category becomes important. Recognizing that religion is an ideological construction that creates and upholds real structures in the world will enable us to question and challenge these structures. Hence the parallel to race and gender. Just as race indexes the superiority of whiteness and gender the superiority of men, so religion indexes the superiority of Christianity (in addition, as Lynch demonstrates, constructions of race and religion often intersect, notably in the case of Western constructions of Muslim identity). Admitting to this is also admitting that religion never operates as a purely descriptive term, nor as an innocent redescriptive category. As a category that inherently privileges a Christian perspective, religion is always to some extent a comparative judgement. ⁵⁰

The critical approach suggested by Lynch to my mind offers a very good synthesis of the most significant developments in the past decades’ scholarship on religion. It is also in line with this approach that I would like to continue. While the scholars referred above have shown that religion is a misguiding category when applied to historical cultures as well as to non-Western cultures, I think one of the most imperative tasks ahead lies in critically confronting the way the category operates in contemporary Western societies. While public life (politics, education, media) by and large hinges on the assumption that religion is a neutral category that denotes specific practices and beliefs, recent research has made us aware of the extent to which the concept continues to implicitly employ norms from its Christian past. Among many other things, this means that the concept of religion is intrinsically linked to the concept of the secular. Let me here recapitulate a point made by Tomoko Masuzawa, namely the fact that religion, by the time it acquired its modern meaning, came to be thought of as something that was in the process of disappearing from European societies, all the while other cultures were presumed to be thoroughly in the grip of it. Through the wars of religion of the early modern era, so the story went, Europe had learned to separate religion and politics by relegating the former to a protected private sphere, while securing an open, liberal and secular sphere for the latter. ⁵¹

It is difficult to overestimate the enduring significance of this narrative, both as a genealogical explanation and as a normative justification of the purportedly secular character of modern European democracy. However, as José Casanova has remarked, it corresponds only selectively to historical reality. For one thing, The Thirty Years’ War did not ensue in the secular state but rather in the confessional absolutist state. What the following centuries saw was not a smoothly running process of enlightenment and secularization. With few exceptions, the conflicts of early modern Europe established a pattern of territorialization of religions and peoples, which was benefitted by the comprehensive emigration of religious minorities overseas. Even after the Enlightenment and the successive implementation of values such as tolerance, equality and freedom of expression, those patterns did not disappear but rather took on subtler forms. As Casanova significantly concludes:

Without taking into account this long historical pattern of confessionalization of states, peoples and territories, it is not possible to understand the difficulties that every continental European state has, irrespectively of whether it has maintained formal establishment or is constitutionally secular, and the difficulties every European society has, the most secular as well as the most religious, in accommodating religious diversity, and particularly in incorporating immigrant religions. ⁵²

Let me briefly illustrate with an example from my own Swedish context. In the early autumn of 2011, a profiled minister of the Church of Sweden started to co-author debate articles with the then chairman of the Swedish Humanist Association (coupled with the IHEU). In a first article, entitled ‘The Church ought to make peace with the critics of religion’, they urged representatives of the Church of Sweden to acknowledge the ‘common democratic heritage’ of modern Swedish Protestantism and secular humanism. The great divide, so their argument went, was not between believers and non-believers, but between those who advocated a strict separation between religion and politics, and those who sought to establish closer ties between politics, state and religion. What the former group should easily be able to unite behind, they concluded, was an ‘uncompromising stance with regard to Human Rights’. ⁵⁴ One implication of this ‘uncompromising’ stance was spelled out two months later in a second debate article, in which the two authors (and yet some contributors) pleaded for a legal prohibition against male child circumcision. Alluding to the established narrative of Sweden as modern and liberal nation, the article argued that Sweden cannot claim to be ‘a progressive country with regard to Human Rights if we continue to compromise the bodily integrity of children’. ⁵⁵ In order to further enhance the conception of circumcision as a barbaric practice that does not belong in a modern society, the authors employed terms such as ‘mutilation’ and compared the practice to cutting off the lobe of children’s ears.

After a few critical interventions, mainly from the Jewish community, the debate petered out and there was no change in legislation with regard to circumcision. ⁵⁶ However, the series of debate articles remains an interesting document because it gives a very good example of the discursive orders that today govern the deployment of categories such as ‘religious’, ‘secular’, ‘progressive’ and ‘democratic’ in much public debate across Scandinavia. ⁵⁷ To perceive the vicious undertones of the articles, it is important to draw attention to a subtle ambiguity that permeates the argument. On the one hand, the debaters state that modern Swedish Protestantism and secular humanism share the same basic norms. On the other hand, they emphatically state that religion and politics should be strictly separated. However, as the authors are well aware, the implication of the two statements taken together is that there is no significant need to keep religion and politics apart as long as we are speaking about Lutheran Christianity, since it is declared to be entirely compatible with the prevailing norms of Swedish secular democracy. Keeping religion at bay, in other words, is only significant when it comes to minority religions.

The argument not only illustrates a point made at several occasions above, that religion as a category is oriented to the norms of Christianity in a way that makes other religious traditions always found wanting. More significantly, it also reveals how the concept of religion is performative in the sense that it is functioning as an othering or even stigmatizing category. The example of circumcision is in this respect emblematic. According to the authors, the issue they have with circumcision is that it compromises the bodily integrity of children. Fair enough. But if the debaters’ prime concern had been the bodily integrity of children, why then single out male child circumcision – a central ritual in two of the country’s minority religions – instead of drawing attention to a broader scope of practices and habits that put your child’s physical well-being at risk (including dangerous sports such as motocross or show jumping, or lasting exposure to junk food)? And why make comparisons to cutting off children’s lobes (which would be an entirely senseless act intended to hurt your child) instead of, for instance, to letting your child undergo a cosmetic surgery to reshape protruding ears (which, controversial as it may be, some parents do with the best of intentions in order to prevent their children from being teased or bullied)?

A likely answer to these questions is that the well-being of children is in fact not what is primarily at stake here, but rather religion, or to be precise, religion that does not live up to the standards of Protestant religion. The assumption that such is the case is strengthened by other similar inconsistencies that come to the fore in the public debate. One can, for example, think of the recurring debates in recent years as to whether public baths should heed Muslim women’s requests that they provide a couple of women-only hours a week, requests that by many debaters have been vehemently rejected on the basis that each individual should be granted equal access. Simultaneously, there have been demands that public baths offer gender neutral dressing rooms, demands that (for good reasons, needless to say) have been swiftly heeded by many baths and that have caused almost no debate at all. ⁵⁸ Why is it that in a country that prides itself on social equality one is willing to respect the needs and requests of one minority group and not those of another? The answer, once more, seems to be ‘religion’. ⁵⁹

Rather than being neutral or purely descriptive terms, the examples reveal how ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are part of discursive orders that put into play an array of associations, sentiments and attitudes – including unwarranted preconceptions about individuals and groups. As regards the debaters referred to above, there is no reason to doubt that they are driven by a true concern for liberal ideals. However, by building up the argument the way they do (the chosen comparisons and contrasts, etc.), they unwittingly encourage existing prejudices and stereotypes about immigrants and Swedes of other cultural or religious extraction than Lutheran Christianity, thus playing into the hands of populist xenophobic parties and making already targeted minority groups even more vulnerable. ⁶⁰

It is against the background of this kind of repressive discursive structures that I wish to argue for the importance of rethinking the way we use religion as a category for organizing and making distinctions in social and political life. In line with Brent Nongbri, I thus contend that instead of buttressing existing definitions of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, we should engage in critical analyses of such boundary drawings, including the power mechanisms and interests involved in interpreting some phenomena, behaviours and practices as ‘religious’ and others as ‘secular’. Such a shift in focus is of particular importance in contexts – such as the Scandinavian – where ‘religion’ and ‘being religious’ are generally charged with negative associations, all the while the inherited Christian tradition is often toned down as a religion and perceived, precisely, as ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’. Arguably, it is such discursive processes that explain why letting children practice dangerous sports (defined as ‘secular’) is not a subject of debate whereas child circumcision (defined as ‘religious’) is, or why infant baptism (by many regarded as an act of ‘tradition’) never occurs as a parallel to brit milah and khitan (defined as acts of ‘religion’, regardless of the fact that many Jews and Muslims themselves regard it as an act of ‘tradition’) in the debate.

Instead of foreclosing debates by staging certain practices and preferences as expressions of religion and others as not – which is a recurring pattern not only in the examples mentioned, but also in the ongoing debates on halal and kosher slaughter, on greeting gestures and on the wearing of hijab, burkini and burqa – the pragmatic approach suggested by Nongbri would imply that we place emphasis on the specific issue at stake in each particular case. In relation to the examples discussed above, one may for instance pose questions such as ‘does the person who observes this practice understand it in terms of religion or not?’, ‘does the practice in question cause physical or mental harm to the person or persons involved?’, or ‘why do we find the “religious” practice x problematic, while we are reluctant to criticizing the phenomenologically similar “secular” practice y?’.

However, while I do concur with Nongbri’s endeavour to shift focus from abstract definitions to particular uses of ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, I think more reflection needs to be done on the concrete embodied life that these uses affect. Put differently, as both Kevin Schilbrack and Thomas Lynch have remarked, there is a lack of reflection on the ontological dimensions of the social constructivist argument that Nongbri and others put forth with regard to religion. While historical and anthropological studies have demonstrated that the concept of religion operates in ways that tend to distort our understanding of what people actually do, feel and think, the critical analysis of this actual and concrete life often remains underdeveloped. However, if we are to develop the critical reflection on the deficiencies and potentially detrimental effects of current usages of ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, we need precisely to direct attention to the specific features in social reality that make these categories misguiding. For, as Schilbrack remarks, it is only ‘in the light of what we learn about how people actually live’ that we can remove inapt meanings and improve our redescriptive accounts. ⁶¹

Let me illustrate once more with the debates on women-only hours in public baths in Sweden. As indicated, these debates generally tend to get locked into principled positions on secular versus religious rights. At a closer scrutiny, however, the demands for women-only hours is not about religion in any simple sense. Listening to the arguments of the women concerned, it turns out that their requests in several cases have less to do with religious teaching and more about bodily integrity – about not feeling comfortable being bodily exposed to persons of the opposite sex for the simple reason that one may not be used to it. Evidently, this is not to deny the significance of respecting these women’s requests as religious rights given the current arrangement of our societies, especially in cases when the women in question themselves explicitly refer to religious arguments. But bringing the discussion down to a phenomenological and experiential level may nonetheless help debaters who instinctively associate religious claims with oppression and irrationalism to gain a richer understanding of the real concerns of these women. Likewise, it may prompt us to reconsider more generally the ways in which we sometimes pre-emptively map certain motivations and claims as ‘religious’ whereas much more complex issues are at stake.

This finally brings me back to the question of experience. One aspect of Nongbri’s strong emphasis on the social constructive nature of all our concepts is his rejection of the claim that there is such a thing as ‘extra-linguistic experience’. To be sure, this is correct to the extent that experiences are interpreted from the very moment they affect us, that is, even long before they are put into words or become the subject of reflection. But acknowledging that such is the case is not tantamount to saying that there are no extra-linguistic experiences in the sense of fundamental bodily experiences that are recognizable to humans across cultural and linguistic borders. On the contrary, our very being as humans is premised on our capacity to use our own bodily experiences – such as pain, fear, joy, awe, anxiety or exhaustion – to intersubjectively recognize those of others. ⁶²

To sum up my argument in this article, I think that a critical attention to the affinities between various forms of experience could be particularly helpful in breaking up reductive and distorting categorizations of human behaviour, customs and practices into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. ⁶³ One may, for instance, draw attention to the fact that experiences related to bodily integrity may be a significant uniting factor for both Muslim women’s and transgender persons’ requests vis-à-vis public baths. Or, to refer to a slightly different domain, one could reflect on the affinities between experiences that some subjects would define as ‘religious’ and others as ‘aesthetic’ – for example, the sense of wonder experienced when confronted with an artistic masterpiece or when overwhelmed by the beauty of a cathedral. This is, of course, not to say that the one experience could be reduced to the other or that complex experiences could be distilled down to more fundamental ‘pure’ experiences. On the contrary, what makes an experience an experience in the more compound sense is precisely the specific interpretative framework in which it is inserted, which is also why one subject’s ‘religious’ experience of, say, a Bach concert, is certainly not identical to another subject’s ‘aesthetic’ experience of the same concert. ⁶⁴ The point I am making, though, is that there are still enough common features in the two forms of experience to enable one subject to enhance the understanding of the other’s experience. Drawing attention to phenomenologically similar experiences can in other words stir our imagination and help us think beyond established boundaries between religious and secular, rational and irrational, traditional and modern, and so on. In this sense, a renewed focus on the experiential level of various cultural practices also has the potential to challenge engrained stereotypes prompted by a discursive order that even in its secular shape continues to privilege Christianity.

Conclusion

During the last decades of the 20th century, Western philosophy saw a renewed interest in religion. This ‘turn to religion’ was in many ways prompted by concrete geopolitical developments, such as the surge of religious fundamentalism or the new visibility of religious expressions and symbols in societies that had long conceived of themselves as profoundly secular. At about the same time, a growing number of anthropologists and historians began to draw attention to the cultural and ideological bias of the category of religion, revealing its roots in a particular phase of early modern European history. In this article, I have tried to give an overview of these significant theoretical developments, exploring both the tensions and similarities between the different scholarly traditions. Drawing on both discourses, I have argued that we should rethink the way we use religion as a category for organizing social and political life, especially in cultures that like to think of themselves as secular all the while still being oriented to Christian norms. In particular, I have suggested that we need to shift focus from attempts to produce viable definitions of religion to critically analysing the mechanisms and interests at stake when we name or interpret some phenomena or practices as religious and others as not religious. Moreover, I have called for a renewed focus on the experiential level of various cultural practices as a way to critically deconstruct the way in which we sometimes pre-emptively reduce complex cultural tensions to a matter of ‘religious’ versus ‘secular’. While not necessarily bringing an end to the problematic aspects that adhere to the concept of religion, such critical inquiring may well challenge the linguistic confusion that permeates much discussion on religion today, and, in so doing, enable us to gain a richer understanding of the complex phenomenon that we for lack of better words still call ‘religion’.