Critical religion and critical research on religion: A response to the April 2016 editorial

Thanks to the editors for discussing my article “Critical religion and critical research on religion: Religion and politics as modern fictions” (Fitzgerald, 2015) in their recent editorial (Goldstein, King and Boyarin, 2016) and allowing me to take up some issues and clarifications here.

On reflection, and partly thanks to the editors’ article, I think the term “critical religion” may have outlasted its sell-by date. I wrote the article last November and December when I was still working as an academic at the University of Stirling, and “critical religion” was useful as a focus for the group of us in the religion subject area. I had used the expression in some publications to demarcate my position from other understandings of “critical theories of religion.” My colleagues at Stirling and I wanted to find a way of indicating a different interdisciplinary approach to studying and teaching the subject. Under the rubric of critical religion we developed and taught together what we believe were good courses for our students, and they on the whole seemed to agree, often with some enthusiasm.

My colleague Michael Marten, assisted by Rajalakshmi Dadur Kannan, constructed and edited a lively and well-designed blog, and it is still a valuable space for a wide variety of people to explore a generally alternative approach to the field (see Critical Religion Association).

However, there is a danger that the term merely becomes a slogan or a marketing tool. It might be better simply to discuss the critical issues as they arise, as we are doing now. I think I should leave it up to others, for example those who contributed to edited books (Fitzgerald, 2007; Stack et al., 2015) or critical religion conferences and workshops, or the critical religion webpage, to decide if they think the term still has useful mileage. I am to some extent still open on the issue but would need to be persuaded.

Russ McCutcheon and Craig Martin are important critical voices, and they are both writers I respect. We do share significant solidarities, especially when facing the entrenched, uncritical practices that still dominate religious studies and other areas of the humanities. However, this does not commit us to being members of a club, and it does not commit us to agreeing on everything. As the editors themselves indicate, we “do not stand as a cohesive unit and … there may be as much disagreement between them as there is agreement” (Goldstein, King and Boyarin, 2016: 3).

So, putting the expression “critical religion” in brackets, here I speak to the substantive issues that the editors raised about my own contribution.

1. The first and most notable point is that, given that the second half of the title of my article was “religion and politics as modern fictions,” the editors hardly mention my critique of “politics” in their comments. Yet, historically and conceptually “politics” as a modern category is as central to my argument as “religion.”

We can approach “politics” in ways similar to “religion.” Many people in religious studies and other disciplines now accept that the discourse on “religion” and its pluralization “religions” and “world religions” is a modern invention; that the discourse on religion and religions emerged at a particular historical moment in post-Reformation Christian Europe and North America; that it has identifiable origins in the Enlightenment; and that it was developed and theorized as a category of classification in colonial contexts. The story is more complicated than this but this will pass as a partial summary. The crucial point is that we no longer take “religion” for granted as a self-evident part of the furniture of the world. We interrogate the category itself, its range of actual deployments, what it does explicitly, but also what it does in less obvious, more concealed ways.

Various corollaries flow from this. One is that religion is not a timeless universal to be found in all societies, but a historically and ideologically specific emergent. Another is that the science of religion or religious studies has not been engaged in neutral and objective description of some observable empirical phenomena in the world, as many of its protagonists have uncritically supposed, but has been constructing the objects it purports to describe. Another methodological corollary is that, having seen that it is a highly contested and unstable category with ideological work to do, it would be contradictory to continue to deploy the term as though it is neutral and innocent for purposes of description and analysis.

The meaning of the study of religion has therefore shifted from the uncritical assumption that some objective and independent phenomena are being observed and described, to the critical task of understanding how the category works and what it does, how and in what circumstances it emerged, and why it seemed necessary to develop a discourse on religions and world religions at all. Then why should we exempt “politics” from the same kind of critique?

Many people also accept that the idea of the “nonreligious secular” is a modern invention. For one thing, the dominant meaning of the term “secular” changed radically and fundamentally. Though the term “secular” was not actually appropriated to mean “nonreligious” until the early to mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a nonreligious domain of rational action arose for the first time at the same historical moment as the new discourse on religion and religions. So the religion–nonreligion binary is a modern invention, and the study of religion has tacitly acted as a legitimation for the superior rationality of the nonreligious secular in its liberal capitalist and socialist forms.

This inevitably raises the question about all those domains that are represented as nonreligious secular, and which are set in binary opposition to religion—for example, “science,” “politics,” “the state,” “nation,” “political economy,” “economics,” “nature,” and “society.” All of these are either newly invented words or old words given new meanings since the seventeenth century.

“Politics” (and “science”) have strong claims for historical precedence because significant parts of the modern liberal capitalist ideology and its legitimation of private property were being formed around these categories in the seventeenth century (e.g. in Locke), whereas “political economy” as a discourse is notable in the eighteenth century (e.g. in Adam Smith), and “economics” as a distinct domain emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Like religion, all of these modern imaginaries are too often (and with notable exceptions) treated uncritically by historians and anthropologists as though they are simply “in the nature of things,” with intuitively obvious and universal application. I question the assumption that we can intuitively identify the “political” and unproblematically distinguish it from the “economic” or the “religious” or the “scientific.”

“Politics” is ubiquitous in the work of those claiming to critique “religion.” We read such expressions as “the political reality of religion,” or “it is really politics beneath the guise of religion.” Religion and politics as a mutually parasitic binary was invented in the seventeenth century and has since operated (I argue) to legitimate and normalize forms of government intended to represent the supposed natural right to the accumulation of private property. This imaginary separation was not the separation of preexisting domains that had become confused, but the invention of two new domains for the first time. The chapter of a book I edited in 2007 was titled “Encompassing religion, privatised religions and the invention of modern politics” (Fitzgerald, 2007: 211–247; see also Fitzgerald, 2011, 2013). That “politics” is as problematic as “religion,” and that these categories are joined at the hip historically and discursively, is central to my argument. They are better thought of as one oscillating binary, though they appear in consciousness as discrete and essentially distinct domains.

This, by the way, is another reason why I do not feel quite satisfied with the term “critical religion,” for it could just as easily be “critical politics” or “critical political economy,” or “critical studies of the state.” This indicates one of the ways that the disciplinary structures of the academy tend to impose conceptual restrictions on our thinking and self-expression. A better expression might be “critical modern categories,” to draw attention to their working together in a mutually parasitic configuration, though their inherent internal interconnectedness is disguised as a mere external contingency of separate referents. This appearance of externality is supported by, and reflected in, the distinct imaginary separation of “religious,” “political,” “economic,” and more generally “secular” institutions and practices. These externalized divisions are embedded in our university disciplinary structures and make genuine interdisciplinarity virtually impossible. These categories are rhetorically deployed in public discourse as though they are universal stand-alone categories with distinct referents, and this illusion is powerfully conveyed, for example, in the oscillating binary “it is either religion or it is politics, but it cannot legitimately be both.” I have given many examples of these rhetorical speech acts, uncritically reproduced by eminent academics as tropes for organizing their descriptions and analyses. I have shown in considerable detail how the assumption that religion and politics do not mix, and, if they do, it inevitably leads to irrational fanaticism, permeates not only public discourse but is constitutionally institutionalized in liberal capitalist power formations, including academic disciplinary structures.

2. “Fitzgerald contradicts himself. On the one hand, he says that the category of religion is used too broadly but, on the other hand, he applies it to neo-liberal capitalism” (5).

It is intended as an irony that liberal capitalism, behind its nonreligious secular representation, is not essentially different from any of the other faith systems that typically get classified by secular agencies as religious. If secular liberal capitalism and its metaphysical postulates are not essentially different from a religion, then the assumed binary collapses under its own weight. Just as everything can be described as “political,” so virtually everything can be described as “religious.” Given the lack of determinate content, we have to look elsewhere to grasp the rhetorical power of these either-or binaries. Otherwise, we remain trapped in circularity.

3. I add briefly that I take neoliberalism to be a more recent and more fanatical version of classical liberalism. Liberal political economy provides the dogma of capitalism. Neoliberalism since the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947 is no doubt a distinctive twentieth-century “thought collective” in its own right, as recent historical studies powerfully illustrate (see Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009). I would, however, argue that, in the longer historical perspective, neoliberalism can be thought of as a fundamentalist revival movement for the twentieth century of the much older (male) private property-owning fictions of liberal capitalism.

4. The editors say: “In the Facebook exchange, McCutcheon’s and Martin’s objections centered on our value laden approach—which is an aspect that we share with religious traditions” (3). I did not participate in McCutcheon’s and Martin’s Facebook discussion. However, the appeal to make the values in our arguments explicit is a good one. I do that more below. Yet the phrase “that we share with religious traditions” is unclear. Given that the deployment of the contested category “religion” and “religious” is what is at issue, then it is methodologically problematic to continue to use this terminology as though everyone knows intuitively what is meant by “religious traditions” as distinct from “nonreligious traditions.” To use the form of words “that we share with religious traditions” tacitly introduces the assumption that what “we” do is “nonreligious,” that there is an essential difference between what we do (we are nonreligious secular) and what religious people do. On the other hand, if what is meant is that many people, whether classified as religious or nonreligious, do in fact share some of the same values, then this also weakens the usefulness of the distinction. The question about which are the religious traditions and which are not is being begged here.

5. The editors state that Craig Martin and I are both “(f)ollowing ultimately Nietzsche, Foucault, and Talal Asad”

Martin is perfectly able to speak for himself about his theoretical guides. Speaking for myself, Marx is a more prominent influence on me, though the teaching of nonacademics such as Buddha and Krishnamurti has been greater still. To me, the practice of meditation is more fundamental than the construction of knowledge claims. And though I quite often cite Talal Asad, who is rightly credited with broaching the question of religion as a category as far back as 1979, it is unclear in what sense I am following him, however much I admire his pioneering work. He and I have different starting points and trajectories, and I sometimes feel uncomfortable with some of his deployments of the contested categories, including “religion” and “politics” and their derivatives.

Within conventional European theory, Marx is a more obvious influence, and I do address Marx. However, I critique a specific aspect of Marx–Lenin, one which permeates the so-called progressive left, in particular the myth of secular scientific progress. I also critique postcolonial and subalternist theorists to the extent that they have failed to deconstruct the imperialist claims of secular reason, claims that are themselves “postcolonial remains” (see Fitzgerald, 2016). I am not aware that this is part of McCutcheon’s or Martin’s project, though it may be.

6. “Fitzgerald bases his argument on Walter Benjamin’s observation that capitalism is a form of religion” (5). To say I base my argument on Benjamin’s insightful fragment is an exaggeration. I cite Benjamin’s observation but also critique it for his assertion that capitalism has no dogma.

7. “we aver—as we imagine Fitzgerald must likewise—a continuing adherence to methods of argumentation, verification, and potential falsifiability commonly called ‘scientific’ which are, implicitly if not necessarily, secular” (5).

It again depends on what you want to mean by “scientific” and by “secular.” To say that “science” is “secular” is to join two unstable power categories. The category “science” is deeply ideological and mystified in modern liberal (and socialist) discourse. Doesn’t modern secular science, which is rhetorically constructed by its influential spokespersons as genuine “knowledge” as contrasted with “faith,” have its own unfalsifiable dogmas and faith postulates? (For a useful list of 10 science dogmas, see Sheldrake (2013)). I cannot see how methodological individualism is the result of falsifiable procedures of observation and experiment. The materialist and physicalist dogmas of most modern science are historically and conceptually parasitic on an ideological binary, spirit-matter, in which matter is “real” and “spirit” imaginary. Yet, “matter” is just as elusive to observation as “spirit.” Spirit-matter is one of a series of dogmatic either-or binaries that includes religion-secular, faith-knowledge, supernatural-natural, and God-world. These binaries step in for each other in a perpetual circular system of rhetorical substitutions that traps us. Yet, none of them are the result or the object of empirical observation.

8. Another point concerns deconstruction and construction: “As it stands, the approach of critical religion is solely deconstructive and not constructive; it does not build anything. Critique should be the first step in this direction but not the last” (4). And later: “the critique needs to have a goal. It must not only deconstruct but it must construct something better beyond it” (6). This is their rather baldly stated opinion, and the “must” in “must have a goal” sounds like a rhetorical imperative of which I am wary. Mine is nuanced differently. I agree that I am not value-neutral. My claim that liberalism is an intolerant, imperialist, and destructive doctrine based on all sorts of myths implies a value judgment. Centuries of propaganda generated by powerful agencies acting on behalf of private property interests have made liberal postulates seem both unavoidably “in the nature of things,” and yet at the same time “how we ought to be.” In contrast, I argue that we ought not to be like that. But there is no independent body of factual knowledge that can settle this contestation.

I do have some idea of which better values might constitute a life worth living. I agree with Marx’s saying that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, [1845] 1969). One question that arises, though, is who gets to decide what those values are and how they should be realized. We are admittedly caught in a circle. Even the appeal to democracy is problematic. One can always ask “whose democracy?” One of the problems with Lenin’s revolutionary movement was that a small elite cadre was deciding such issues and they ended up with a totalitarian state that crushed dissent. Yet behind the façade of representative democracy, the dominant liberal and neoliberal order of power is less benign than the organs of propaganda would have us believe. This question is particularly pertinent in the contemporary United States, which the historian Sheldon Wolin has fruitfully described as an “inverted totalitarianism” (Wolin, 2008). And as recent historical studies suggest, neoliberalism has been—since the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947—the long-term, planned, constructivist project of an elitist “thought collective” designed to infiltrate all power centers, which it has done with remarkable success (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009).

My purpose is not to oppose activism but to question the dominant discourse of “the political” and the fictions of politics that seem inevitably to frame it. My argument is that the discourse on politics, which seems to offer the intuitively obvious resource for radical activism in search of social justice, is a central element of an ideological configuration that serves the interests of corporate private property interests. In one way or another, this discourse was invented by a white male colonialist class of opportunists, many of them slave owners, and continues to be propagated by the state and various agencies of propaganda, including think tanks, the mainstream media, specific academic departments, and the political parties with their obfuscating myth of left, right, and center. Radical dissent loses its momentum and is contained and neutralized if its goals are framed in the categories that serve the liberal and neoliberal status quo.

I have some idea of the values and practices that I imagine ought to replace those of liberalism and neoliberalism. As one of the founding members of a housing cooperative in London in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I would definitely advocate democratic cooperatives in housing, and probably any other institutionalized form of life. Banks, universities, schools, and hospitals, for example, should be collectively owned and organized by all the people involved in them. There is a rich tradition of democratic cooperatives, and most of them have been destroyed by liberal private property-owning capitalism and its agencies of propaganda and repression. But almost by definition, the details of how such an imaginary should be realized in our lives is itself a collective enterprise and goes way beyond the abilities of any one person.

To critique, as I do, the supposed right of the individual or the corporation to the unlimited accumulation of private property with minimal responsibility for its impact on others and the environment strongly implies that I can imagine countervalues and practices. It implies that a life religiously devoted to grabbing as much as possible for oneself, with minimal regard for the widespread misery and alienation that results, amounts to a dismal, inauthentic, and unjust life. This statement is replete with value judgments that imply some notion of justice and authenticity. But it is a statement that says little about how we can collectively make it meaningful. It is very general and does not amount to a “goal,” in the sense of a detailed philosophy of the good life or a practical plan for its realization. I am wary of the danger of elites like us claiming to know the answers to such questions.

My view is that the critical deconstruction of the categories of the understanding that constitute liberal or neoliberal subjectivity is a primary task for those of us who are paid to think with them. No radically new imaginary can arise until this self-critical process has been taken collectively much further, and we academics begin to develop an alternative vocabulary that bypasses and undercuts the dysfunctional liberal and neoliberal discursive power formations that are destroying the world. Otherwise, we will merely continue to reproduce the circular dominant discourse that constitutes and reconstitutes “reality” in marginally altered ways.

Academics working and receiving their salaries in supposedly secular liberal universities often conceal their own alienation behind the fictions of neutral and disinterested knowledge production—“objectivity” as distinct from “subjectivity.” We dare not challenge the top-down authoritarian command structures of market managerialism, which make a mockery of the claim that we live in a democracy, that we are progressing, and that the imaginary domain called “politics” or “the state” can eventually set us free. Power, yes; but power unshackled from the categories and the tropes imposed on us. Nevertheless, to make another value judgment, the editors have done a good thing in providing a forum for this conversation, and I am grateful to them for including my thoughts.