Critical religion and critical research on religion: Religion and politics as modern fictions

Introduction

The editors have generously allowed me to add my voice to the question that they pose in their editorial: “How can mainstream approaches become more critical?” (Goldstein, Boer, King and Boyarin, 2015).

My intention is to summarize what I mean by “critical religion.” I do not intend to address the editorial in detail, nor any of the articles that follow, as this would require too much space. It is offered as a summary of the kind of approach to the topic of “religion” that I have been developing over the years. The degree to which my own approach to critical research on religion does or does not overlap with others is a further matter. I do think, however, that what I have to add has relevance to at least some of the issues raised by some of the contributors. ¹

Critical religion

I have used the term “critical religion” ² for several years to mark out a distinctive position. ³ “Critical religion” is shorthand for the critical historical deconstruction of “religion” and related categories. The category “religion” is part of a configuration of dominant categories that constitute much of what we mean by modernity. It acts in binary opposition to the “secular” in its various forms.

One of the most powerful of the related categories is “politics,” which, in ways similar to “religion”, appears in public and academic discourse both as an unproblematic universal and simultaneously as a specific product of historical emergence. Many readers of a journal that makes religion its central focus may take politics to be of only secondary interest. Surely, the proper place to critically problematize politics is in a journal of political science? Such a reaction would exemplify the discursive illusion that I intend to critique. My purpose here is to argue that the modern invention of generic religion was simultaneously the modern invention of “politics.” We cannot understand the discursive power of religion without considering how it makes and has made secular politics appear as the inevitable and rational domain for the solution of conflict. ⁴

Since I published The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), I have questioned in a series of publications ⁵ the usually tacit assumption that there are things in the world to which the category religion points, things that can be observed, described, and analyzed and have argued instead that it is the category itself and its various discursive deployments that need critical attention, for it is being constructed in the very act of describing it.

To those who say they know that it is merely a conventional classification, but nevertheless find it good to think with, I have argued that we only find it good to think with to the extent that it forms part of our identity as modern secular liberals, a power formation that serves specific interests, and into which we have been indoctrinated and our critical faculties effectively disabled.

The idea that as researchers we can simply decide what we intend to mean by religion is an illusion. Many people in various disciplines have tried to give religion a scholarly definition, and many of them are contradictory. In the wider public discourse, religion is in fact deployed to include such a wide range of practices that it ceases to have any specific meaning. Even theories of socialism have been consigned to the religion category.

The ideological fictions that have been most exempted from the religion category are those of secular liberalism itself, such as nation states, self-regulating markets, and the naturally possessive individual. These fictions are not inductions from empirical observation but rhetorical devices represented as science and common sense, in contrast to “faiths” and “spiritualities.” In a few short but by now famous notebook remarks Walter Benjamin (1921) connected capitalism as religion. Here I will argue that liberal political economy, as the dominant theorization of the supposed rationality of capitalism, is itself not essentially different from what typically gets classified as a religious dogma. Critical religion contributes to this line of thinking. ⁶

If religion can mean anything, then it means nothing. But having abandoned the search for an essence, or for a valid operational definition such as Wittgensteinian language games, we must turn our attention to the operation of religion as a power category. The question worth asking is why this indefinable category has achieved such rhetorical significance in our public life, why it is specially mentioned in written constitutions and the subject of judicial interpretation, why it is deployed as it is by politicians and the media, and how we would be able to think of ourselves as liberal secular scholars without it.

The private property society

Much of The Ideology of Religious Studies was a critique of secular sociology and its confusion of its own constructed imaginary with some supposedly objective feature of the world. Religion is part of a classification system that appears to secular liberal consciousness as neutral, given unproblematically as corresponding to how the world is, independent of the discursive formations that constitute our collective inter-subjective apprehensions. Critical religion challenges this appearance of neutral objectivity and proposes instead that religion is a power category that, in dialectical interplay with other power categories such as “politics,” “science,” or “nature,” constructs a world and our own apprehensions. While there may be a variety of different interests that are and have been served by this configuration, I draw particular attention to the interests of private property, and the various beliefs, institutions, and practices that have come into the world to protect private property.

The right to private ownership of the earth, including the right to buy and sell for purely personal gain, unencumbered by any effects the practice might have on the lives of other people or the environment, is a historically peculiar idea, one which would have been incomprehensible to most of the peoples who ever existed (Linklater, 2013). And yet this fiction of the possessive individual (Macpherson, 1962) and his or her supposed rights of private ownership ⁷ has been transformed into our dominant notion of “human nature” and has become the globalizing norm of the world order.

“Politics” was invented in the first place in the 17th century to refer to what was then a radically new concept of government elected to represent male private property interests. Over the centuries, and especially since the founding of the United States of America, liberal propaganda has discursively embedded “politics” and the state as the neutral domain of rational conflict resolution, freed from the unwanted interferences of “religion.” Today, it is not only university departments of political science that are responsible for the mystified reproduction of politics and the state as the neutral forum for adjudicating different interests. Uncritical studies of religion perform the mirror image function through the discursive reproduction of religion and religions as reified entities and even as malign agents. The myth can only be challenged from both sides of the ideological division.

The category religion and its various reproductions as “faith” and “spirituality” has a unique function in the way it enables the mythical basis of private ownership of the earth ⁸ and makes it seem normal and inevitable. The right to unlimited private accumulation of our common organic inheritance, regardless of the effect on the rest, is the default position of liberal and neoliberal capitalism (see also Cox, 2007). In putative contrast to the blind faith of “believers,” private ownership of the earth is celebrated by generations of secular liberals as an enlightened discovery, a sign of a higher stage of progress and development, our collective arrival at mature knowledge of “reality,” including what it means to be human.

Two faces of “religion”

There are two notably different images of religion in public discourse. One is that religion is essentially, and in its proper nature, peace loving, non-violent, non-political, concerned with the inner spiritual life and the other world. Religion has nothing to do with power. Religion is a matter of personal faith and piety, essentially separated from the rough-and-tumble of practical politics and economics.

The other image of religion is that it is essentially barbarous, violent, and irrational, a malign agent in the world, causing conflict and mayhem and threatening the essentially peace-loving and reasonable nature of the non-religious secular liberal nation state (Cavanaugh, 2009; Fitzgerald, 2011).

These two images of “religion,” which go back to the 17th century are popular today in the liberal media and propounded and debated by liberals, a notable recent example being the debate between Tony Blair, a Catholic, and Christopher Hitchens, an atheist (see Blair, 2010; Helm, 2014; see also Hitchens, 2007). For Hitchens all religions are irrational abominations, whereas for Blair, there are good religions and bad religions, what he calls “perversions of faith.” Good religion is what conforms to, and does not challenge, liberal secular principles. Good religion stays out of “politics.” Bad religion takes a critical stand against liberal categories and is, therefore, fanatical.

Neither Blair nor Hitchens thinks to question the distinction between religion and politics. Both of these viewpoints—either that all religion is bad, or that religion is good in its true non-political nature but bad when it gets mixed up in politics—presuppose an essentialized distinction between religious faith and secular reason, and both fail to draw attention to their own ideological commitment to liberal values, which are taken uncritically by both writers as common sense. Regardless of Blair’s other commitment to Catholicism, his prior commitment seems to be to secular liberalism and its values.

Religion is, it seems, a potent force that has historically had a propensity to stand in the way of secular liberal progress. Religion has a propensity to violence and irrational barbarism when it strays blindly into “politics.” As Cavanaugh (2009) has powerfully argued, this myth of religious violence, feeding on a category mistake, has successfully deflected attention from the unmatched violence of the secular nation state in pursuit of markets and the war industries that it supports. Religion has consequently required taming and disciplining to conform to the civility of liberal values. In its proper nature as the angel in the house, religion does not challenge the right to unlimited private accumulation, the exploitation of cheap labor, or the workings of markets as the mediation of all human relations. Nor (in its proper nature) does religion challenge the myths of nationalism. In the final analysis, religion is inner faith of a purely voluntary kind, the private conscience of the individual, at a stretch relevant to family morality, but not to be mistaken for any serious claim about how public affairs ought to be conducted. Furthermore, only the liberal secular nation state and its agents have the right to decide what is and is not a genuine “religion.” One of its agents is the academic discipline of religious studies.

Religion and politics

Religion and politics as generic abstractions came into the world at the same historical moment in the late 17th century. Though they have been constructed rhetorically as essentially different, along the axis of various either-or binaries—it is either religion or it is politics, it is either faith or it is reason, it is either spirit or it is matter, it cannot legitimately be both—these categories do share some common features. One is that they both combine a vacuous universality with a historically specific genealogy, a combination that has the effect of inscribing a particular modern ideological formation into the common sense and universal nature of things. Another common feature is that both terms seem, for the vast majority of people, self-evident. We all know what we mean by “religion” and by “politics,” we know how to use these terms, until the unexpected moment when someone questions what we mean.

In Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007), I drew attention to the essentializing distinction between “religion” and “governance” or the political society made by William Penn (1680) and John Locke (1689, 1690). With Locke (and also with Penn), the discourse on politics was a sustained argument about the need for a domain of governance strictly separated from another domain called religion, an idea constituting radical dissent against the status quo. These two legislators and writers of Bills of Rights had powerful influence on the Founding Fathers. Locke’s influence in particular was conveyed in 18th century North America through such influential sources as Cato’s Letters and also Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. Locke and his Enlightenment advocates provided the sense of “politics” that most strongly flourishes in the modern world, which is government that represents and protects the interests and the rights of (male) private property. Locke invented his own account of “man in the state of nature” and derived various natural rights including the right to private ownership of the land (Locke, 1690, especially chapter 5).

These ideas were a challenge to the ideal of the Christian Commonwealth, but they have long since become the new liberal orthodoxy. Religion and politics appear in modern rhetoric, not merely as separate, but as different kinds of things or domains of practice, defined by different functions, purposes, and attributes. There must be a difference, even if we cannot specify what it is. In the many examples of academic and wider public discourse I have given in my various publications (see, e.g., Fitzgerald, “Introduction”, 2007a, 2011), it is either religion or it is politics; it cannot be both. If religion and politics mix, then a violent reaction takes place, and the peace-loving secular state and its generous liberality has to defend itself against irrational religious fanatics who confuse and mix what ought to be kept separate. “Religion,” and especially an essentialized “Islam,” has even been represented since 9/11 as a malevolent agent returning from exile and threatening the peace-loving secular order (Berger, 1999; Berman, 2009; Juergensmeyer, 1993, 2000, 2004; Petito & Hatzopolous, 2003).

In modern discourse religion in its true nature—Blair’s angel in the house—is constructed as inner and private, in contrast to politics, which is outer and public. One is about faith in an unseen world, the other about knowledge in this world. One is about the supernatural and the other the natural. One is metaphysics, the other an empirical encounter with the real world. In academic and more popular texts, politics and the state are represented as essentially about the real world of power relations, whereas religion is (or ought to be) concerned with things other than power, such as gods, salvation, mystical enlightenment, ancestral worlds, individual “spirituality,” harmless and thus tolerated nostalgia for “tradition,” and quaint outmoded values and practices that do not challenge those of markets. Liberals and neoliberals describe as bad or false religion—Blair’s perversions of faith—those institutions and practices that oppose the imposition of “free markets,” the exploitation of cheap labor, and the right of private corporate interests to enclose common land and extract surplus value, regardless of the effects on the rest.

Liberty

In his notebook fragment “Capitalism as Religion” (1921), Walter Benjamin suggested that capitalism is religion without dogma. I propose instead that capitalism does have dogma, and the most accessible term for this dogmatic belief system is secular liberalism. That we tend not to notice that liberalism is not essentially different from what typically gets classified as a religion is the result of centuries of propaganda that has assured us that, unlike religions, liberal beliefs and values are in tune with scientific truth and common sense.

Liberty is a key term in the liberal liturgy, just as private property in its various incarnations, generalized as Capital, is the most sacred object of liberal devotion (see also Goodchild, 2002). Belief in propriety entitlement to absolute ownership is one significant component of the “liberty” of liberal theorists—perhaps the most significant in relation to the effect on the property-less and the commons. The concept of liberty expresses the freedoms that were sought by male property interests since the 17th century. ⁹ It was a demand that became powerful with a largely nonconformist class of men in 17th and 18th century England and North America who desired freedom to pursue their own private interests unencumbered by the predations of monarch and church. ¹⁰ Included in this demand was a form of government that represented these private property interests. It was such a form of government for which the terms “politics” and “political society” emerged, particularly in the influential Treatises on Government of John Locke (1690).

To such a class of men such an arrangement would indeed have been liberating, for it offered a powerful defence against what they saw, with some justification, as the arbitrary power of the traditional institutions of the time. From these interests, and this concept of liberty centered on rights such as the right to private ownership, developed a series of ideas on what came to be called political economy in writers such as Richard Cantillon (1755, see Rothbard, 2010) and Adam Smith (1993 [1776]). According to the general thrust of this narrative, the dedicated pursuit of self-interest and private property will generate free markets that in turn will produce, through the “natural” workings of their self-regulating mechanism, an overall harmony of interests; though as part of that harmony, there will be winners and losers, which is the “natural” order of things. Those who do not own property must sell their labor in free markets as a commodity. This classical liberal doctrine of political economy was refined in the early 19th century science of economics by Ricardo, Bentham, Malthus, and others, historically preceding Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. The idea of the survival of the fittest—respectively in the competitive marketplace, or in “nature” (red in tooth and claw)—finds a place in both the economic theory and the biological one (Harvey, 2010: 197).

This notion of liberty clearly had negative implications for equality, especially when the gains of the most energetic acquisitors of private property are inherited, and thus form a class monopoly. Some concepts of liberty pay more attention to “equality” insofar as some forms of liberal or social democracy seek—as with Roosevelt’s New Deal or the post-war Labour government in UK—redistribution through taxation, to provide variable degrees of social security for the poor, or to provide educational opportunities to the less advantaged; generally to give a helping hand to those disadvantaged by the circumstances of birth, in order to create a more level playing field of opportunities.

However, this more positive idea of liberty that characterizes liberal democratic or social democratic parties to various degrees does not challenge the basic principles of privatization on which capitalism operates. Arguably the political economy of social democrats amounts to a strategy for protecting the system from its own worst features, and thus of securing its survival. This more positive attitude to liberty is a historical latecomer, for it was negative liberty—liberty for male private property owners to pursue their own self-interest without interference from the monarch or the church—that gave birth to liberal political economy in the late 17th and 18th century. It is this more negative concept of liberal liberty that appeals to Neoliberals in the tradition of Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman (see e.g., Hayek, 1944, 1949; Friedman, 1962; see also Chomsky & McChesney, 1999; Klein, 2008; Harvey, 2007).

The illiberal of “liberal” in liberalism

The term “liberal” makes us think of generosity, flexibility, and tolerance, and there is good reason for this: these attributes are the oldest and commonest meaning of liberal. Locke talks about the liberality of nature. However, there is a second meaning of liberal that has little to do with tolerance or generosity, and more to do with market values, self-maximization, and the systematic extraction of surplus value from other people’s labor. This is the illiberal liberal, and it lies at the sharp heart of liberalism. As an ideology, liberal capitalism has gained much from the rhetorical confusion of these quite different meanings of liberal. The term began to develop a more technical meaning in Adam Smith and others in the 18th century, connecting it to arguments in favor of free trade—private property, division of labor, the progress of nations, and a doctrine of self-regulating markets. The classical economists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries such as Ricardo, Jeremy Bentham, Richard Whately, Nassau Senior, and J. S. Mill accepted the term as descriptive of their work; and the 20th century neoliberals such as Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Rothbard, and others extolled, revitalized, and evangelized the classical principles of liberal economics. ¹¹

It was arguably the growing power of liberal political economic ideology in the 19th century in the sense of negative liberal liberty—the sacred right of private property protected from any interference—that made the abolition of slavery so difficult, a problem resolved by compensating the slave owners for their losses rather than compensating the slaves. It was this concept of liberal liberty that radically influenced the Report of the Commission on the Poor Laws (1834) in England, which recommended abolition of support for the poor, a charitable duty dating back to Elizabethan times. The commission, which was very much influenced by liberal virtues of work, discipline, and indebtedness for those without property, proposed the Victorian system of Workhouses, which were to be designed as such harsh and unpleasant places that the risk of starvation, and long hours of back-breaking work for low wages, would seem like the better option. I suggest it is this concept of negative liberal liberty that has been powerfully revived by the neoliberalism of the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics (see Klein, 2008). Yet, liberal and neoliberal economics is taught as an objective science based on facts about the real world, rather than as a will to assert a vision as to how the world ought to be. Markets are thought to be natural phenomena, and belief in the eventual emergence of a global system of free markets as the condition for the emancipation of the world—or at least for the elect—is being pursued with a fanaticism usually reserved for the so-called “religious extremists.” The modern invention of religion as the backward past has served to deflect our attention from the irrational faith postulates of liberalism and its science of political economy. This religious fanaticism in the pursuit of private property is presented by the diverse agencies of secular liberal propaganda as our coming-of-age, our enlightened encounter with the really real.

As I argued in The Ideology of Religious Studies, secular sociology is one powerful agent for the reproduction of the fictions that appear as common sense reality. However, it is not only sociology that imagines religion and religions, and in the process constructs the superior positionality of the secular sociologist. Religion is rhetorically and widely constructed as a problem for secular rationality in public and private discourse, in the media, and in the pronouncements and policies of ministers and government agencies. Constitutions imagine religion by “othering” it as a (licensed and thus restricted) right, and in the same breath announce the existence of the non-religious secular nation state. Economists claim that self-regulating markets are a discovery on a par with the discovery of other “natural” phenomena such as gravity. Some natural scientists boast about their grasp of the empirically apprehended real world, and deride the delusions of “religion.” Yet every key term is contested and contestable—religion, science, world, nature, nation, and secular, all operate at the level of powerful vacuity. These are all rhetorical categories, deployed in order to persuade us how the world ought to be, not descriptions of any objective fact. They are fictions that operate discursively to regulate our apprehensions of the world, and thus to construct it.

Today the social democratic values of the post-war period—the tendency to positive liberty—have been given a rhetorical flogging by the (neo)liberal secular media. This neoliberal defence of liberty and assault on equality since the 1970s reveals what Marx already showed, that “politics” and “political economy” is an invention that masks the property-owning function of secular national governments in the service of the wealthy and their managers. ¹² These private-interest ends are achieved not only through national governments but also through the power of giant privately owned corporations; through institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank, Deutsche Bank, and the Bank of England; through international agencies such as the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, the ECB, and the European Commission; and by way of secretive international trade agreements that reflect the power of private corporations and their shareholders over the national governments. Should we say that these are economic institutions? Or political? ¹³ Given that it is so difficult to make sense of the distinction, we perhaps should fall back on the term “political economy.” However, this still leaves us with the problem of explaining how a political-economic practice differs from a religious one.

I suggest that bad religions, in Blair’s sense of “perversions of faith,” are those that stand in the way of the practices of extortion, understood by believers as the virtue of entrepreneurship. These practices are given legitimation through the modern fictions of unlimited private property rights, self-regulating markets, and the possessive individuals we are constantly reminded we “naturally” are, or alternatively that we ought to be. These sacralized faith postulates are represented as the real world, in contrast to the world of “faiths” and “spiritualities.” Nobody has ever seen a self-regulating market, or a nation state, or a world of politics, yet, like the workings of the Holy Ghost, and the power of holy relics for previous generations, they constitute the everyday, common sense “reality” as well the hope of salvation.

Religion and the invention of politics: Christian civility as against pagan barbarity

In post-Reformation English, at least in the early modern period, the predominant meaning of religion was “our Protestant faith.” In this context, “faith” was the precondition for knowing anything at all. Indeed, it was the precondition for one’s identity as a person. It did not refer to a weak belief in the absence of proper knowledge, but to Christian truth. What constituted Christian truth as distinct from pagan darkness or “superstition” was a specific kind of power formation or civility policed by agencies such as the ecclesiastical and civil courts. It was embodied in the ideal of the Christian commonwealth. This was the hierarchical “politic body” or “body politic,” the descriptive term “politic” here not referring to a distinct domain of non-religious government as in the modern discourse, but to an overall harmony and utility in the production of the Christian life. Its opposite was not the non-religious secular but pagan irrationality.

Christian truth encompassed all institutions and practices. The monarch was the anointed and sacred heart of the Christian Commonwealth. It was for this reason that Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) denied that there could be any such thing as a Christian Commonwealth. His business was to offer an alternative myth, his own version of “man in the state of nature,” and advocate a new concept of government elected to represent the natural rights of (male) private property. In the Treatises Locke critiqued Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, which had argued on the basis of Biblical exegesis that the sacred Christian monarch was directly descended from Adam and thus the legitimate patriarchal heart of the Christian Commonwealth. It can thus be argued that modern liberalism substituted one form of patriarchal power based on private property rights for another.

The term “secular” did not mean “non-religious” (which like “the religious courts” would presumably have been an incomprehensible term to people then) but was primarily deployed to refer to the priesthood. “Religious” as an adjective was coming in to use in the 17th century, for example, Bunyan uses it in Pilgrim’s Progress, but its main deployment was in “the religious,” referring to the monks, nuns, and friars and their “religious houses.” And in Bunyan anything that is “religious” is Christian.

Religion in the sense of Christian truth did pluralize to “religions” during the 17th century; it almost always referred to contested interpretations of Christian truth and to the different Protestant and Catholic churches. The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, taken by theorists in international relations to be a watershed event in the emergence of the modern world order of secular nation states, is always concerned with the Christian Prince and his religion, either Catholic or Lutheran, and its references to the secular does not yet demarcate a non-religious government. It distinguishes between the temporal and the ecclesiastical, and the term secularization refers to the transference of properties from one kind of Christian institution to another.

Yet, given the expanding colonial context and the encounter with other peoples and their multiple forms of life, it is not surprising that “religion” began to develop a more generic deployment. This was a time when religion had as much to do with rational civility in every aspect of life as with the individual and his or her inner conscience or psychology. Christian colonizers speculated on the degrees of distance from Christian truth and civility of the various peoples whom they intended to dominate by assessing their marriage practices, diet, levels of technology, forms of government, dress, ceremonial practices, and forms of life generally. In this context of classifying and compiling knowledge in order to make judgements of various kinds, there are moments when “religion” and “religions” seem to appear as a neutral descriptive category. ¹⁴

In late medieval Catholic and early modern Protestant England, to have religion (Christian truth) was also to have civility and rationality. This I believe was also a guiding assumption of Catholic Portuguese and Spanish colonialists in their encounter with Native American peoples, as it was later for the English Puritans. Religion was not in the first place a private faith of personal salvation but the very condition for being a person, a public order of (male) power and reason.

The Catholics had adopted their own version of this civility–barbarity discourse from the Romans, who had in turn adopted theirs from the Greeks, and the Protestants not only inherited it from the Catholics but transformed Catholics into the worst case of pagan barbarism, in the first place the Pope as the Whore of Babylon, but also the Irish whose lands the English and Scottish Protestants under Cromwell in the 1650s began surveying and measuring out into saleable parcels. The Protestant colonization of Catholic Ireland was to a significant extent conducted to extend the civility of, and the market in, private land ownership. This parceling out of barbarous Irish lands, and its transformation into the civility of private Protestant ownership, was paralleled by the private enclosure of common land in England, Scotland, and North America. This is the origin of politics, deemed to be a domain of government representing freedom of conscience—the privatization of the individual psychology, and the interests of (male) private property, sealed off from outside interference.

The earliest attempt to separate religion from government and to imagine a neutral civic domain may have been among those Protestants in the North American colonies such as Roger Williams who rejected both the intolerant English church-state and the equally intolerant Puritan theocracy. In England, the first men (women were largely out of the picture) who seem to have consistently articulated such a separation may have been William Penn and John Locke in the 1680s, both Non-Conformists who had large and significant interests in North American territory, and both of whom had a tangible and recorded influence on the U.S. Founding Fathers.

To be baptized was perhaps in some ways analogous to becoming the citizen of a modern nation state, a birth certificate and passport, which conferred legal identity, and without which one was nothing, a non-person and consigned to purgatory, or in today’s terms a refugee without a nation, condemned to indefinite detention without charge or due process. In contrast to the civility and rationality of Protestant Christians, most of the others were pagans requiring tutelage—mainly by being made to work, and also through propaganda and indoctrination. This discourse has not died. It reveals itself in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, in the pursuit of private corporate interests, and in the language and thinking of some Protestant missionary organizations. It even in a sense persists beneath the cloak of the modern scientific discourse on generic religions, for the default model of “a religion” is frequently a stripped-down, deistic version of “Christian faith.” However, what persists most powerfully is the sacred liberal imperative of private property to enclose and self-maximize with minimal interference.

Secular civility against religious barbarity

In Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007) and Religion and Politics in International Relations (2011), I argued that this ancient discourse on civility and barbarity, after centuries of asserting Christian civility as against pagan barbarity, morphed into today’s implicit and often explicit assumption of secular civility and progress as against religious superstition and backwardness. In the 19th century, the tripartite Enlightenment distinction between savage, barbarous and civilized nations derived from Montesquieu and deployed by such theorists as Lewis Henry Morgan and E. B. Tylor, was not only an academic classification but guided foreign policy. For example, the Japanese male elites in the 1850s and after were explicitly told that, to be considered a civilized rather than barbarous nation and, therefore, properly qualified to enter into equal trade treaties, they must adopt a written constitution, which, among other things, should distinguish between religion and the secular state. ¹⁵ The history of written constitutions in the formation of modern nation states, and in the discursive consolidation of the religion-secular binary, is or ought to be an integral part of the critical study of religion.

Orientalism

This religion–secular binary discourse—secular civility as against religious barbarity—seems to me to be the underlying discursive form of the modern–tradition binary, and the discourse on development and modernization (see also Bosco, 2009). To be modern is to be civilized, enlightened, liberal, and developed. One can be civilized and practice a religion if it is a purely private, personal choice harmoniously compatible with liberal values and does not threaten the sacrality of private property, the doctrine of markets or the rituals of representative democracy. Apart from this window of opportunity, being religious in a liberal capitalist regime is at best either a bit strange and backward; or, perhaps like yoga, sheng fui or zen meditation, abstracted from profoundly different contexts, “being religious” can be an individual market choice of personal development (Carrette and King, 2005). If, however, “being religious” means valuing communal practices that impede the progress of private accumulation, then it is a sign of backwardness and barbarism that threatens the peace-loving and only reluctantly violent secular liberal state. Recently, I placed orientalism into this frame as a “postcolonial remains,” and argued that, paradoxically, even Edward Said failed to deconstruct his own secular positionality and thus his tacit if unintended collusion with the modern myth of secular civility as against religious barbarity (Fitzgerald, 2015a).

Marxist-Leninism and the myth of secular progress

I also aim part of this critique at Marx and Lenin (Fitzgerald, 2011). Marx’s critique of liberal political economy and his concept of alienation have obviously influenced my own work considerably. However, while Marx and Lenin powerfully critiqued the private ownership of the means of production, they failed to free the theory of socialism from the liberal secular myth of progress. Marx and Lenin did not consider that the division between “religious” and “secular political” commitments is itself a key part of liberal capitalist ideology and a deep source of alienation (on alienation see Shah, 2014; Fitzgerald, 2015a; Fitzgerald, 2011: 91). This is one reason why Marxist-Leninism failed to constitute a fully revolutionary counter-ideology. The critique of bourgeois political economy cannot be completed until the critique of the liberal othering of another imagined domain called religion is simultaneously achieved. Only by a thorough critique of these either-or binary categories can a new language of power relations and a new discourse about democracy take place.

Secular liberalism as a confession of faith

Secular liberalism, I argue, is based as much on unobservable metaphysical abstractions as any other totalizing discourse, and there is no essential difference between the faith fictions of liberalism and those that are typically classified as ‘religions. All hegemonic discourses, in their own manner, appear subjectively as the limits of the ability to think, and thus as normalized common sense. Liberal categories appear to our own subjective apprehensions as an encounter with scientific fact and common sense reality, in contrast to the myths and fictions of “religion.” Secular liberal categories such as the progress of nations, self-regulating markets, and the natural right to the unlimited accumulation of private property appear as “modern,” normal and inevitable, in contrast to irrational religious myths, “traditional” faith systems, and any organization based on communitarian values.

The illusion of the superior rationality and intuitive common sense of secular liberalism is achieved through a series of rhetorically generated binaries: secular reason is based on knowledge of “nature,” whereas religions are based on faith in “supernatural” entities; secular reason is an empirical encounter with the real world, whereas religions are mere beliefs about some other imaginary world; secular reason is objective and factual, whereas religions are subjective and speculative. This is an ideological either-or polarization that exists only at the level of dogmatic ideas. In these ways, any worldview that is perceived to have stood in the way of liberal (and neoliberal) political economy and the interests of private property has been relegated and marginalized as the backward and irrational past of “religion.” However, “nature,” “progress,” “self-regulating markets,” and “nation states” are mystified abstractions that no-one has ever encountered in empirical experience. The same can be said of the possessive individuals or self-maximizers that we are constantly told by liberal political economists we “naturally” are. The postulates of secular liberal ideology are as imaginary as any religious belief.

Religion in binary oscillation with non-religious fictions

The invention of generic religion and religions makes the idea of the non-religious possible. It is this oscillating binary of the imagination and its various rhetorical forms that is the object of critical deconstruction. Yet, no one can say where the boundary between them lies (Schwartzman, 2014). It may not be entirely arbitrary because there are limits to what can be thought at any point of historical imagination; but it is radically contingent on the needs of the moment (Von Stuckrad, 2013:12). What does and does not qualify as a religion in the liberal secular nation state is continually contested and negotiated. ¹⁶ There must be a distinction between a religious and a secular practice, even though we cannot say how a religious practice differs from a political or economic one.

Since “religion” as a category is always in relation to other modern categories, in particular the non-religious secular with which it forms a parasitic binary, then the critique of “religion” must at the same time be the critique of those others. Religion is not a stand-alone category, but a signifier in a chain or configuration of categories. We might call this dominant configuration liberal modernity, liberal capitalism, or liberal secularism, but it is important to bear in mind that the terms “secular,” “liberal,” “modern,” and “capital” are part of our critical problem. All of these terms are themselves historically generated constituents of today’s dominant and globalizing ideology. We are caught in a totalizing and self-sustaining circularity.

Critical religion is interested in the historical transformation of the meanings of “religion,” “secular,” “society,” “science,” “nature,” “nation,” “liberal,” “liberty,” and other key terms in the dominant discursive configuration of the last three hundred years. Though there are a plethora of different interests that drive the modern world, they find their most concentrated will to power in the invention of liberal and neoliberal political economy as the theoretical justification and normalization of private ownership. The revolution in the ownership of land generated theories of representative government, practices in global finance and the banking system, and the fiction of the nation state. Today the earth, the air, the water, the energy, and virtually any other aspect of our shared genetic inheritance is liable to privatization to reward those most devoted to the sacred right of accumulation without regard for its effects on the remainder.

Some readers will object to the claim that the (mostly male) pursuit of private property, and the various illusions about human nature and progress that are consequently generated to provide justification for this pursuit, is the main driver of modern history. It can after all be argued that what we call modernity has multiple points of origin and multiple factors in its on-going discursive constitution.

The least we might agree on is that there is no way to study “religion” as though it exists independently of these other discursive imaginaries, the possessive individual, a natural right to the endless privatization of our shared organic environment, the myths of nation states, and salvation through markets. To understand “religion” today we must understand belief, bordering on the fanatical, in the superior rationality of capitalism.

Conclusion

“Critical religion” is the critique of the categories that determine “modern” consciousness. Critique as I understand it means bringing into consciousness the categories of the understanding that operate largely below consciousness, as though they are instinctive or normal, and which, by organizing our experience and knowledge, form and even determine our apprehensions of the world. Religion and political economy are two of these. The invention of generic religion has made the invention of non-religious secular government and the doctrine of market economy seem intelligible and, with the help of centuries of propaganda, in conformity with science and common sense. Theories of government understood as the representation of the interests of male private property quickly unfolded into the sustained myth of private ownership rights, and markets that automatically self-regulate. Constructed as aspects of “nature,” ¹⁷ these fictions have reduced or eliminated the need for a basis in morality in human transactions and exchanges.

Liberal theories of political economy and government provide the dogma of capital under the disguise of “science.” Few modern law-makers in any political party or government in North America, Europe, the wider English-speaking world, and increasingly the rest challenge the myths that constitute liberal political economy. Neoliberals pursue these fictions with a zealous assurance of their real world veridicality. Social or liberal democratic parties operate with the same fictions but hope to ameliorate the worst effects through policies of limited redistribution and taxation. The discursive power of the religion-politics binary remains stubbornly concealed, even while it is widely deployed in public and academic discourse, and constructs “us” collectively even as it constructs “me” as individual modern subject. In this sense, those of us who identify in some fairly radical sense with critical religion, with critically deconstructing the categories that constitute modernity, have been engaged in a critical deconstruction of self, for what am “I” or “we” if not the conditioned and institutional product of modern liberal individualism and the connected components that go to make up liberal and neoliberal subjectivity?

To some readers, this may seem tame. How can critique of dominant modern categories be revolutionary? Is this itself not a bourgeois concept of revolution? This practice seems insignificant compared to the Occupy movement, in which thousands of people take over the empty public spaces of the city. When we think of a revolutionary practice, we might think of something more dramatic, such as rioting, national strikes, armed insurrection, the storming of the Bastille, and the dictatorship of the Proletariat.

On the other hand, one might ask which of the anti-capitalist revolutions has established a democratic egalitarian society based on values of social justice as against the unequal, “red-in-tooth-and-claw” liberty of secular liberalism? Is this quest for democracy and social justice simply an idealistic fantasy that offers a temporary escape from the “economic realities” we are constantly assured they are? Critical religion proposes that we first have to challenge the terms of the debate. This includes avoiding the reconstruction of secular liberal fictions in a “socialist” form. Academics and their universities have a potentially powerful role to play in the subversion of the core beliefs of secular liberal and neoliberal modernity. True, a challenge to the disciplinary structures that currently divide us inevitably brings one up against the resistance of the liberal or neoliberal university, its resilience-trained management, its authoritarian structures and its profit-making priorities. I argue that no wider movement of radical change can succeed without the widespread contribution of academics who can in good faith refuse to engage in the uncritical reproduction of the secular liberal categories of the understanding in their own work. A good place to start would be to see that the division between the study of religion and the study of politics or political economy is an illusion that serves a mystified liberal capitalist power formation. To faithfully pursue this critical project erodes trust in the simple-minded, loveless fictions of liberalism and neoliberalism, promoted as science and common sense, and acts as a necessary prelude to any possible new ways to represent and nurture the earth’s common organic inheritance.