Does past religion have a past? Habermas,religion,and the sacred complex

Introduction ¹

My aim here is to enact a category shift in a conversation currently mired by an outmoded concept: religion. The phrases “past religion,” “world religions,” and “salvation religion” are familiar to most of us. Scholars and laypeople alike readily identify religion in the past and debate about the role of religion in the future. In the past decade or so, few philosophers or political theorists have not touched on the subject. However, I perceive something wrong with many of these conversations. As a scholar located in the disciple of religion, it troubles me that so few philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists writing about religion have taken seriously the strong reservations expressed by historians of the concept. These reservations, if adequately substantiated, require rethinking what we mean by religion and perhaps suggest abandoning the concept altogether. Coming to terms with these criticisms, yet still engaging productively with social theorizing that may errantly assume the validity of the concept, is no easy task, but one that is certainly worthwhile. My reflections on the writings of Jürgen Habermas aim to provide some critical considerations of his use of the concept religion and open aspects of his work to a radical redescription in terms of the developmental imagination. It is my view that unless we are mindful of locative nature of the modern concept of religion, we risk creating profoundly misleading images of our past as well as highly misrepresentative images of one another.

Habermas and the productive power of religion ²

For Habermas, the legitimacy of religion as a category almost goes without saying (e.g. Habermas 1984/1987). With increasing frequency, he reminds the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity of their own restless religious longing—a longing he sees as bound up with our moral intuitions. When considering past injustice, when confronting death, and when faced with the reifying objectification of human nature, religious longing comes to the fore as a paradoxical awareness of what is missing. Habermas (2003a: 114) also sees something rather profane in religious reflection, an intuition suggesting “there can be no love without recognition of the self in the other, nor freedom without mutual recognition.” This moral intuition emerging from religious reflection is shared by all of the great religions of the world whose strong traditions can be traced back to the Axial Age (Habermas, 2017: 43). Secular religious longing and morally intuitive religious reflection are viewed as constitutive aspects of the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking. On this common ground, hypothetically dating back to before the Neolithic period (45), Habermas proposes an ancient dialectics of the sacred and the profane as well as the contemporary conviviality of faith and knowledge.

The complementarity of faith and knowledge is important for Habermas because of the colonizing and disenchanting tendencies of modern systems. Modernization, Habermas (2003a: 114) worries, is a harbinger of the “insidious entropy of the scarce resource of meaning” which must be counteracted by compensations, creative destructions, and ongoing translations. While Habermas never quite celebrates religion, nor advocates its return, he is impressed by its stabilizing qualities and its capacity for creating and maintaining solidarity through individuation. Religious thought also expresses, for him, a tenacious awareness of human fragility and recognizes the vulnerability of all of God’s creatures.

In this view, contemporary religion stems from ancient roots. The archaic experience preserved in the strong religious traditions of the Axial Age create and maintain bonds of social solidarity imperiled by the individualistic orientations of modern ethical conceptions. Such bonds are facilitated in advance by a shared belief in the promise of a redemptive or liberating justice (Habermas, 2017: 86). Religious thought is nourished by its ongoing connection with a sacred complex, a dynamic relation between ritual and myth that continues to sustain communities as they respond in a practical way to the contingencies of fortune and misfortune. Contemporary religious communities safeguard this experience by means of exploiting the sacred complex of myth and ritual within liturgical practices. In doing so, they are able to lay claim to a particular privilege: “access to archaic experience—and to a source of solidarity—from which the unbelieving sons and daughters of modernity are excluded” (56). Habermas (2010: 19, 2017: 105) also argues that religious language deriving from archaic experience may “call attention to forgotten or repressed aspects in public debates over morally sensitive issues” and foster an awareness of that which “cries out to heaven.” It would seem today that neither science nor philosophy can replace the affective powers of religion and the inspiring potential of religious language in the modern world (Habermas, 1992a: 51, 1992b: 237).

Past religion (religions rooted in the Axial Age revolution), salvation religion (religion that fosters a belief in redemptive justice), and world religions (nourishing strong traditions that have the power to shape civilizations) are all key ideas in Habermas’s sketch of the emergence of postmetaphysical thinking. With these concepts in hand, Habermas envisions a difficult but unblemished future for religion. The future of past religion is double: past religion refers both to the relevance of archaic religious experiences preserved in the strong traditions of the Axial Age but also to the comparative study of past religion that yields an awareness of religious plurality and the irrevocable consciousness of being one religion among many (Habermas, 2008: 137; see also MacKendrick and Sheedy, 2015).

In sum, the productive power of religion is its capacity to provide a reservoir of meaning, mechanisms for maintaining social solidarity, and moral intuitions in the context of an increasingly profane world. It is not at all paradoxical for Habermas to see both a rise of religious longing and an increase in secularization. Under the rubric of modernity, scientific knowledge and political philosophy become secular and their claims subject to procedural adjudication. Such procedures proceed reductively. Religion, on the other hand, responds to the contingencies of life and death in a more comprehensive fashion. Even as the world becomes more secular and subject to rationalization, reason lives on within religious thought that is open to ongoing interpretation and translation. Such thought carries with it an unexhausted semantic potential that may inspire and create social solidarity and cultivate an awareness of the fragility of human life.

The invention of world religions

A growing body of literature on concept formation in the study of religion shows that what we typically call religion is an ahistorical and decontextualizing bundling of attitudes and practices. This conceptual bundling of “inner disposition and concern for salvation conceived in opposition to politics and other ‘secular’ areas of life” was part of a political project requiring the separation of public and private spheres as a means of protecting, preserving, and transforming a particular aspect of Christian faith and ritual: believing (Asad, 1993: 27–54; Nongbri, 2013: 24). As historians continue to demonstrate, the hustle of religion is neither a neutral nor objective report on an existing state of affairs but the work of theological and political activists (see, especially, Arnal and McCutcheon, 2013; Cotter and Robertson, 2016; Dubuisson, 2003; Fitzgerald, 2000, 2007; Harrison, 1990; Lincoln, 1999; Masuzawa, 2005; McCutcheon, 1997; Smith, 2004).

In the wake of the European Reformation, religion was re-imagined in order to make way for a new kind of politics and a new kind of taxonomic regime. Until the modern era, the designation religion as applied to a bounded tradition would have made little sense. For those enjoined to the political and national upheavals of modern Europe, the category became an attractive and effective redescription of motivations that allowed actors to uncouple from one tradition or another and embrace an alternative past and imagine an alternative future.

Numerous examples of such uncoupling can be cited. The reworking of the category religion allowed clusters of people to be classified in a new way but also allowed people to redescribe and reinvent their own histories. With the help of “the philological find of the century,” Christians in Europe, for example, were able to imagine themselves as heirs to an Aryan legacy with ancient roots in the East (Kippenberg, 2002: 43–45; Masuzawa, 2005: 147–178). Similarly, the ancillary category myth was also revived at this time. Historians of folklore and philology recreated the category as a means of nation building, allowing Europeans to ingeniously bypass their Christian context by claiming a language, land, and ethic rooted in an ancient pre-Christian epic, myth, and ritual—however fabricated (Lincoln, 1999). Buddhism, as a bounded entity, was also created at this time; it was a point of anxious concern since the first reports on it suggested Buddhists vastly outnumbered Christians. This was a particular shock to European Christians who scarcely had time to reorient Christianity as a world religion before finding it to have an unmitigated rival (Almond, 1988; Masuzawa, 2005: 121–146).

Classification schemes also underwent a profound alteration. Until the modern era, European Christians classified people from around the world on a fourfold basis: Christians, Muslims, Jews, and heathens (Smith, 2004: 179–196). Christianity was religion, not yet a religion. The concept religion was used primarily to refer to the piety and discipline of a Christian believer. Jews and Muslims were more or less considered Christian heresies, expressing partial and truncated aspects of the one true and only faith (Nongbri, 2013: 65–84). The heathen remainder was simply a catchall category exhausting the possible classification of others.

With the invention of world religions, new traditions were not simply added to the existing classification scheme. The entire category underwent a profound transformation. Christianity had been synonymous with religion but as the cauldron of world religions came to a boil, Christianity was redesignated as the best religion or simply an exemplary religion among many. The difference is important in the history of the discourse on world religions because it also establishes the advent of “religion in general,” an entity so profoundly contradictory that it would paradoxically attain equal taxonomic status with positive religions. ³ The term that had been used to describe monastic affiliation was now being used to describe a power that shapes civilizations—culture, ethics, and economy—and may even explain how civilizations emerge in the first place (Kippenberg, 2002: 149).

When we think of religion today, we have a tendency to see it was having its own autonomy. Religion refers to an extraordinary sphere of discourse and practice amid the profane, characterized by its strange and puzzling non-instrumental or non-functional features. Furthermore, religion is bundled as something special and separate: there are religious things and there are non-religious things. Typically, the entire world of human affairs is divided neatly into separate non-contaminating (“symbiotic”) spheres. This peculiar yet commonplace view of religion, as an almost ahistorical and apolitical phenomenon, is more likely than not the progeny of a rather Protestant rubric. Nongbri (2013) views John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration as a turning point: “from the late seventeenth century, the isolation of religion as a distinct sphere of life ideally separated from other areas of life allowed for a new kind of mental mapping of Europe and the world” (104). When it comes to conceptualizing religion using this rubric, a conception exerting tremendous influence on contemporary politics, a number of problems emerge. In what follows, I explore a few examples that show how the modern concept religion exerts a highly distorting image of history and social interactions (for a good case study on the distorting influence of Protestantism for the history of religion, see Smith, 1990).

Example 1: On the perception between religious and nonreligious action

Martin Riesebrodt argues in The Promise of Salvation that all societies and cultures differentiate between religious and non-religious actions. Habermas agrees with Riesebrodt that religion is best defined in relation to salvation and transcendence and would agree that religious and non-religious actions can be distinguished. For Habermas (2017: 37), the extraordinary quality of religious ritual is its self-referential character and its “lack of a referent in the everyday world.” “Rites are not connected directly with the functional contexts of social cooperation” (36) and do not “refer to a jointly identifiable ‘something in the world’” (36–37). Without this particular quality, religion would lack the motivational power to systematically modify behavior in an otherworldly sense. I am drawing on Riesebrodt in conjunction with Habermas here as Riesebrodt’s work presents the most sophisticated defense of religion as the promise of salvation to date.

Making a case for the meaningful separation of the sacred and the secular, Riesebrodt (2007: 22) writes “even a peasant whose religious interest may consist primarily in carrying out rituals having to do with harvest, weather, and health will recognize the religious practices of other strata and groups as such.” The concept is so axiomatic for him that he is able to say without blush that the separation between religious practices and political institutions is actually “quite rudimentary” and concludes with “a perception of differences between the religious and the nonreligious is expressed in the thought and actions of people of diverse historical periods and cultures” (44).

This rather audacious claim, that people in all times and in all places distinguish between my religion and your religion, and religion and non-religion (25), is rooted in a definition of religion that is substantive. For Riesebrodt, “religions usually claim the ability to ward off misfortune, surmount crises, and provide blessings and salvation by communicating with superhuman powers” (72). Notching his conception of religion with salvation and the superhuman allows him to avoid associating religion with the clubbiness of “alpinists, nudists, vegetarians, philatelists, golfers, and rabbit breeders” (73, 74). Drawing on but modifying Melford Spiro’s definition,

Religion is a complex of practices that are based on the premise of the existence of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, that are generally invisible … The “superhumanness” of these powers consists in the fact that influence or control over dimensions of individual or social human life and the natural environment is attributed to them—dimensions that are usually beyond direct human control. (74–75)

Translating past religion

To begin with, there is a less than slight problem of translation, an issue Riesebrodt does not address. Riesebrodt is quick to accept the word religion as an adequate translation of a number terms appearing in the ancient world. Following Brent Nongbri, it strikes me as plausible that the modern conception of religion that Riesebrodt and Habermas are working with, religion as the promise of salvation, is a notion that relies upon a particular idea about the interiority of the self and the otherworldliness of the sacred that is foreign to much of the premodern and ancient world. It also suggests an easy separation between worldly interests and otherworldly interests, a distinction far more blurry than it might appear.

Nongbri’s (2013: 24–45) compelling study of the insertion of the word religion into ancient texts argues that the term religion is profoundly misleading when applied to the ancient world. Discussing the Latin term religio, the Greek term thrēskeia, and the Arabic term dīn, Nongbri concludes that the modern term religion with its implicit reference to a private and interior realm of the individual (such as an individualistic conception of salvation) is wholly inadequate when used to classify aspects of life (law, social order) outside this realm.

His point can be readily applied to Riesebrodt’s discussions. For example, Riesebrodt (2010: 39) cites the Edict of Milan as follows: “we might grant both to Christians and all men freedom to follow whatever religion each one wished.” Riesebrodt cites the Edict as an example of the widespread recognition that religion is a distinct sphere of life. As Nongbri notes, however, the term religion here refers to the phrase threskeia/religioni that is misleading if associated with the modern conception of religion. In this context, Nongbri (2013: 36–37) suggests that the Edict is not granting freedom of religion as such but subsuming deity worship or cult under a larger project of the state interest in currying divine favor in general.

The image suggested by Riesebrodt about recognizing religion when we see it is deceptive. The Edict does not, as he claims, put Christianity on the same legal footing as other religions, but may express a more cosmological interest in the health of the government. Far from a secularly minded document, this document could be part of a larger ritual-legal context that has recently shifted from persecuting Christians to not persecuting them. In this context, the separation of religion and politics is inconceivable. The Edict, in effect, could be interpreted to recommend an accommodation of a variety of worshipped deities so that the state as a whole is edified. Worship should not be confused with belief; proper practice predominates the former, not inward disposition. ⁴ We should not find it surprising for a state to recognize differing objects of affection. The so-called freedom of religion here does little more than recognize the difference in worship of the hero/deity Jesus and the hero/deity Asclepius. There is no special recognition of a non-religious sphere, simply the ongoing business of state for which a distinction between the religious and non-religious, as defined by Riesebrodt, is unthinkable. It may even be questionable to assume a cogent distinction between worldly and otherworldly, as Roman divinity was assumed to be a question of materiality (Ando, 2008). Attitudes and practices that did not have to do with a particular kind of cult or worship remain unacknowledged, perhaps even unnoticed.

On believing and goes without saying

This difficulty of separating religion and non-religion can be approached another way as well. Maurice Bloch’s study of Madagascar shows a classic misunderstanding between early 19th-century Christian missionaries and the local Malagasy. As Bloch notes, the European Christian missionaries faced an unexpected problem: they could not figure out what the Malagasy believed. In other words, Christian missionaries were puzzled by the apparent absence of a distinction between religion and non-religion. The missionaries, of course, understand religion to be matters of belief. As Bloch reports, the Malagasy did not seem to believe anything. Yet, it was a pressing concern of the missionaries to unearth the errors of “savage” religion and replace such paganism with true and proper Christian beliefs. As modernists, the Christian missionaries knew that the pagans had religion, since everyone has some sort of religion however errant or heretical, they just needed to figure out what that religion was.

A certain resolution was established when the Malagasy and the missionaries collectively rested on the idea of idols/sampy (outsider medicines). Sampy refers to objects and cults often foreign in origin and typically viewed as “in question.” As Bloch (2005: 108–113) notes, new medicines were and are continually introduced while others are dismissed as ineffective or harmful. The key point is that sampy are chosen or believed. Not called into question at all, even after the Merina (the dominant group in Madagascar) converted to Christianity, were the rituals and practices concerning ancestors. By way of explanation, Bloch wryly notes, “the ontology of ancestors was not a suitable subject of reflection.” In Merina diction and practice, ancestors have a largely implicit character: “In ordinary contexts, the Malagasy are simply not interested in whether they, or anybody else, ‘believes’ in ancestors … any more than they are interested in whether they, or anybody, believes in ‘fathers’” (109–110). The Malagasy assume ancestors exist. The “rhetorical status [of ancestors] is no different from that of rain” (111–112). The joint equation of sampy with idols leads to a great auto da fé leaving the ancestors all but untouched.

The issue here turns on a peculiar Christian precept that remains central to most modern definitions of religion: believing. As a believing religion, Christianity relies upon emphatic statements endlessly repeated. This emphatic declaration is Christian belief.

These statements of belief are typically taken to be so, but at the same time seems to require some sort of extra-reflexive and exaggerated quality in order to earn the designation “faith.” This exaggerated believing is an act of value or duty for Christians and, so it would seem, the evidence required in order for Christians to perceive in others any kind of belief or adherence to a religion at all (on the curious qualities of belief, see Bloch, 2005; Lopez, 1998; Nye, 2004; and Ruel, 1997).

Even though Riesebrodt (2010: 18) is explicit in conceptualizing religion as practices of intervention, he qualifies what counts as a ritual intervention by saying “religion is defined as practices that are based on a belief in superhuman powers that can provide blessings or ward off misfortune.” Very clearly the Malagasy do not believe in ancestors. For them, ancestors exist. At the same time, it makes sense to think that the ancestors are imagined to participate in the health and welfare of the community and should therefore be considered as part of the religiosity of the Merina. The very thing Riesebrodt claims is axiomatic in all times and in all places is by and large invisible to Christian missionaries, even if it is rather obvious to the anthologist or scholar of religion.

What this example cautions against is the hasty conclusion that religion is easy to recognize, suggesting that religion and non-religion are only distinguished within particular frameworks of valuing and classification. Christian missionaries value belief and recognize cognitive attitudes as beliefs only when they are similar enough in form and expression to their own exaggerated, repetitious, obligatory rituals of believing. Put otherwise, Christian missionaries only recognize something as religion if it takes particular ritual forms, such as creedal believing, that match their taxonomic categories.

The lesson we can draw from this is that differentiating religion from non-religion cannot readily be based on the self-understanding of so-called religious actors, but must be viewed as an analytic framework imposed on the world by scholars (for the classic formulation of this point, see Smith, 1982). In the example of the Edict and in the example of sampy, we see social actors making value judgments rooted in their own local perspectives. As scholars of religion who adopt an observer’s perspective, it may appear to us that the Edict reflects a religious politics or that the Malagasy are religious by way of their imagined relations with ancestors. In both instances, however, we impose this designation as a means of ordering our data. Contrary to theories of religion that adopt a more participatory perspective, we must note that the label religion does not reflect the self-understanding of the actors.

Example 2: On the transcendental social and the illicit separateness of religion

With these reservations in mind, we can speculate that distinguishing religion and non-religion is less a universal human characteristic and more the prerogative of scholars aiming to divide the world up in a particular way. The visibility of what usually passes for religion is only possible when aspects of cultural life deemed to be religious are thematized explicitly and in a particular way. Salvation and belief are examples of such concepts within Christianity and thus Christians are probably adept at recognizing, conceptualizing, and criticizing competing notions of salvation and belief, especially in relation to a supposed superhuman or supernatural realm. While we might expect actors affiliated with strong interpretive traditions to talk about others in terms of their own attitudes and practices (belief, heresy, and so on), we generally expect scholars to have a more self-reflexive perspective.

Keeping with the same example mentioned above, drawing on the work of Igor Kopytoff, Bloch explains that in most African languages, the same word is used to refer to living elders and dead ancestors. This makes sense because, in transcendental and pragmatic terms, they are the same kind of beings with powers of blessing and cursing. Traditionally, scholars of religion have identified practices having to do with ancestors as a religion of ancestor worship (a routine identification given the supposed symbiotic relation between religion/secular and sacred/profane cultivated by 19th-century scholars of religion). However, if elders and ancestors are part of the same system, it makes little sense to segregate one particular social relation from the rest. Why not speak of “elder religion” or “junior religion” or for that matter “male religion” and “female religion?” The problem, as Bloch (2013: 29–31) observes, is a conception of religion that is rooted in a particular historical trajectory that makes a hard distinction between natural and supernatural, human and superhuman. One set of relations is denoted as natural and the other as supernatural or religious. These two sets of relations are viewed as symbiotic—as separate and bounded entities.

Russell McCutcheon and William Arnal (2013: 151) comment on this situation, stating that the “invocation of the idea of ‘religion’ tends to separate the phenomena under investigation from their most revealing mundane functions, contexts, and analogues.” This conceptual separation of religion from the social world is a normative strategy that preserves the integrity of an imagined religious system by means of segregation and quarantine. It would appear, then, that the separation of religion from non-religion by the scholar of religion entails a strong normative evaluation. To say that relations with ancestors express a religious relationship whereas relations with elders express a non-religious relationship is to ignore that both are rooted in a larger transcendental social network. Likewise, to say that belief in salvation is religious whereas affiliation with a particular ethnic group is non-religious is equally illicit. Both are rooted in transcendental social networks and are efficacious means through which we deal with the contingencies of life, happy and unhappy. Theorizing that rituals pertaining to salvation are uncoupled from contexts of social coordination while rituals pertaining to hierarchies of elder and junior or male and female are connected to such contexts is a dubious distinction for a scholar to make.

The point here is that the designation religion, as signaling the extraordinary specialness of an inward belief in superhuman powers, is a highly prejudicial concept. It is prejudicial not because the belief in superhuman entities is a western preoccupation but because only certain kinds of superhuman entities are recognized as religious. Attitudes and practices segregated from everyday culture do not warrant being segregated. It does not make sense to say that ancestors and gods are religious whereas equally superhuman notions of masculinity and femininity or junior and elder are not religious. To my knowledge, no one has theorized status functions as religious despite the rather obvious affinities. Most of our imaginary creations express highly non-instrumental characteristics. That some of these are called religion and others are called culture is the result of a lack of parity and the illicit privileging of one set of practices over another.

Religion: Where did it all go so wrong, what’s next?

When James Laidlaw responded to writings in the cognitive science of religion and its undue preoccupation with superhuman agencies, one of the first things he notes is that much of what is said to be explained has little to do with the everyday lives of the religious communities he studies. For Laidlaw, religion is generally concerned with maintaining traditions. Relations with superhuman powers and superhuman agencies may even be derivative. Even concepts like salvation, if they can be applied, are often held at a distance. It is true that much of the work of within Jainism and Theravada Buddhism is soteriological. But “as important to the transmission and content of the traditions as beliefs, are institutions, roles and relationships, practices (including and especially bodily techniques), narratives, and material culture including visual representations” (Laidlaw, 2007: 223). Ghosts and otherworldly references are part of these traditions “but they are not what these projects are about, nor are they in any sense central or even, frankly, relevant to them” (223). It may seem odd to say that God is a secondary player in theistic communities, but when we consider day-to-day living, we see a range of very ordinary concerns in the foreground (see, for example, the discussion of food and politics in Daniel Sack’s (2000) Whitebread Protestants). Quite often, in fact, we see superhuman representations deployed in a far more strategic fashion that the “belief” model would appreciate. Bloch (2005: 123–137) speaks of ritual deference as a means of producing and reproducing a sense of ahistorical authority. Arnal and McCutcheon (2013: 134–170) focus on the social utility of imaginative creations and how certain agents are marked off as counterintuitive in order to modify and challenge existing social hierarchies.

An obvious response to the idea of religion as a catalog of strategies for reproducing culture might be this: if religion is tradition, what separates religion from everything else? Doesn’t religion lose its specialness if no meaningful distinction can be made between the altar and the kitchen? Wouldn’t religion just blend in with everything else?

Consistent with Laidlaw’s view, preparing a meal for the family in the traditional way may best be construed as part of a religious tradition. If I can put it this way, while it may seem that preparing a meal for ancestors is a non-functional activity, lacking the practicality of providing sustenance for living kin, these rituals of serving and preparation must be viewed as participating in the same transcendental context. ⁵ Instrumentality is a rather barren measure of species that lives largely in an imaginary universe.

With this objection, it becomes apparent that staging of the exceptionality of religion expresses a desire to bundle, preserve, and protect a particular sphere of attitudes and practices and mark these as distinct from their historical context. Hans Kippenberg (2002) has done a masterful job explaining how the scholars imagining past religion simultaneously aimed to understand the history of religion but also to protect religion from the ravages of historicism. The shift away from religious history to ethically inflected religious experience reflects this protectionist stance (175–186). The idea that religion reflects an otherworldly interest is itself a hypostatized rendering of a wide range of ordinary practices deeply entwined in a much larger transcendental social imagination.

Once the concept of religion as a stable and independent otherworldly ethical power is recognized as a conceptual bottleneck, we need to rethink the modern discovery of past religion and consider what exactly we have been talking about. When considering the supposed otherworldliness of religion, its lack of a referent in the objective world, it might be helpful to see that these references are far more common and prevalent than one might think. In a certain sense, many if not most of our imagined interactions lack a reference in the objective world. As Arnal and McCutcheon (2013: 156) have called for, it would be helpful to develop a topology of the imagination for the ways in which we imagine and stratify different kinds of entities (for an overview on the imagination, see Taylor, 2013). ⁶

Consider the difference between how we treat imaginary entities such as Harry Potter or Zita the Spacegirl and entities such as God, Santa Claus, and the Tooth Fairy. Entities such as parent and money receive a different kind of treatment. The spectrum runs from representations we view as pure fantasy to representations we take for granted. Between fantasy and reality, we encounter a range of interstitial entities. Interstitial entities are representations whose veridicality is contested, and it is these entities that tend to attract a fair bit of attention and controversy. In addition to the attractiveness of interstitial entities, many of these representations are in constant social fluctuation. The zombie apocalypse is pure fantasy, but it becomes a bit more real when scholars start to develop a neuroscience of zombies and gun enthusiasts start using a zombie scenario as leverage for more powerful weapons (Baker, 2013). Ms. Marvel is also a fantasy figure, but the representation continues to be used to combat racism (Landis, 2016). These figures never quite cross over into the realm of reality, but they cease to be mere fantasy when taken up in the hands of political actors.

In other words, these entities do an unusual amount of cultural work and are more often than not surrounded in ritual. It is here that we might best locate the attention of the scholar of religion, not to look into the eyes of a culturally postulated super-agent for traces of our collective humanity, but to identify patterns of stratification, classification, and hierarchy, to examine how interstitial representations are used, and to identify their role in our evaluations and affections (examples of such studies can be found in Juschka, 2009 and Lincoln, 2014).

Given the reservations I have expressed about the concept religion, it also follows that the concepts sacred and profane, developed with great vigor after the concept religion had been developed, might also be misleading. In what follows, I provide a redescription or alternate account of Habermas’s report on the sacred complex as a crucible of archaic experience and a source of moral norms. By sketching an alternative account, I am hoping to show that what Habermas aims to outline with the category religion (and its attending categories sacred, profane, myth, and ritual) can be reconceived without the pitfalls of the classical modernist conception. Studying religion without religion should allow us to see a wider angle of human activities and further investigate and better understand the entwinement of culture and the social imagination.

The wormhole of religious experience

When taken as an intellectual formation, religion, for Habermas (2017: 42), concerns “observances in connection with conceptions of redemptive justice.” This is further qualified by retreating from the more commonplace use of religion by sociologists and anthropologists that includes all possible confrontations with extraordinary forces of salvation and misfortune to focus on “the major world religions which Max Weber studied and Karl Jaspers traced back to the Axial Age” (43). While we might at first be struck by the remarkably idiosyncratic conception of religion Habermas is articulating, it does not step outside the standard modernist conception. Habermas extends religion vertically into history rather than broadening the conception across the horizon. The “strong” traditions are limited to “Zoroastrianism in Iran, monotheism in Israel, Confucianism and Daoism in China, and Buddhism in India and (with the proviso that it lacked deeper roots in the cult of the polis) Greek metaphysics.” These religions assumed the form of “canonized scriptural doctrines that left their imprint on entire civilizations” (43). The Axial Age demarcates a revolutionary cognitive breakthrough, fashioning a new conception of salvation and redemptive justice, while at the same time preserving “the archaic unity of myth and rites” and making them compatible with a higher level of reflection.

Without this proper core, the religions would not have been able to stubbornly affirm their status in contrast to secular thought up to the present day. Through their rootedness in the sacred complex, they remain connected with an archaic experience to which all other cultural sensors and sectors have lost access in the course of social modernization. (44)

With this remarkable hypothesis, Habermas is able to fire a straight line between the contemporary dialectics of faith and knowledge and the archaic dialectics of sacred and profane. The ongoing generativity of the sacred complex, the relevance of religious practices for contemporary communities, is made unreservedly sensible if it is imagined to carry with it the origins of human morality and social solidarity. It is no wonder that Habermas is reticent to suggest that religious language is outmoded when he sees it as bearing witness to the remarkable moment when normative rightness comes into play in a secondary linguistification of the sacred: “binding energies initially generated through rituals are connected only subsequently with the language that arises from everyday contexts of cooperation” (xi). If, as Habermas (48) imagines, rituals are designed to deal with a particular disruption in experience and preempt the dangers of a breakdown of social integration, the experience encapsulated in ritual is perhaps the paradigmatic communicative learning experience. The experience of the ineluctable quality of social relationality serves as the ultimate medium through which communicative problem solving becomes available to cognition. This extraordinary form of communication is the ideal mechanism for creative problem solving within the collective and the ongoing reproduction of the collective (on the relation between learning and experience, see Habermas, 2003b: 13). From this we can conclude, I think, that a sense of obligation is the quintessential religious experience for Habermas.

Critical considerations

The capacity of contemporary religious ritual to inculcate archaic experience seems to be a bit of a stretch. It also appears to harbor a rather essentialist claim. Following Bloch’s lead again, ritual experience is peculiar but it cannot be qualified as “archaic” in any meaningful sense. Rituals facilitate a feeling of the eternal by means of restricting meaningful connection to context (Bloch, 1974, 1989). The feeling of transcendence is a result of a process of formalization wherein affect takes precedence over proposition. Habermas (1992b: 233–234, 2017: 41) expresses this as a fusion or syndrome of validity. The difference between Bloch and Habermas, however, is that Habermas sees in rituals the condensation of meaning, congealed forms of communication. Bloch’s emphasis is less on the meaning of ritual and more on the way in which rituals create powerful affects (conformity, transcendence, and emotion). For both, ritual experience can result in the creation of social solidarity by means of the bonds created by mimetic behavior. Rituals mess with our chemicals. Psychotropic mechanisms, such as ritual, afford new and innovative interpretive possibilities making them attractive for creative forms of social cooperation (Smail, 2008: 165). The advantage of Bloch’s view is that it resists authorizing discourses on religion in the name of some mysterious (purportedly) religious experience.

If we follow Bloch’s lead, it is at this point that we must uncouple the religious concept of salvation (responses to blessings and calamities) from ritual experience. Interpreting an experience as a response to blessing or suffering is a normative intervention, not a direct result of the ritual context itself. Conceptual thought is interpretive. Ritual experience does not possess meaning as such; meaning is assigned through interpretation. This is why Joan Scott (1991) rightly speaks of the politics of experience. Narrations of experience, mythic or not, anticipate an authorization of one social agenda or another and cannot be pigeon-holed as the “opaque other of reason.” No experience as such can be qualified as “religious” or “soteriological” or “archaic”; these are normative interpretations of a socially generated and previously authorized narration. In other words, it is a normative move to interpret ritual experience as having to do with salvation. Had the ritual been performed with a modest adjustment, authorities may have signaled that it was nothing at all—not a proper ritual. The communal emphasis on salvation or redemptive justice is independent of the experience of ritual practices. If this is the case, Habermas’s thesis regarding the linguistification of the sacred may be a red herring. Meaning is not frozen in sacred symbols. Meaning is creatively generated by an interpretive community making use of existing narratives, symbols, and authorities to create, maintain, or dissolve competing social formations. The meaning assigned to ritual experience is decidedly ad hoc and not intrinsic to the sacred complex itself. ⁷

It would appear, then, that the otherworldly or extraordinary character of rituals is not a narrative reflection of ritual experience or the sacred complex but a narrative invention. Just as Tomoko Masuzawa identifies the invention of world religions, I see here an equally ingenious, but no less hypostatized, invention or reinvention of the sacred. The question should not be what these rituals mean, but it should inquire about how they used. What is the utility of otherworldly or non-obvious or extraordinary representations?

Another issue concerns Habermas’s notion that religious experience forms a stable and monolithic essence that remains untouched by historical encounters with others. His model of interaction is symbiosis (Habermas, 2017: ix) and assumes that interactions are between intact and intractable social groups, each with their own immutable essence. As Aaron Hughes argues, this position conceals a theological and apologetic tendency. Symbiosis is a biological metaphor, referring to a mutual benefit between two distinct species or organisms. Exchange is largely superficial as each species nudges the other along at a formative moment in its evolution (Hughes, 2017: 62). The metaphor, as used by Habermas, suggests that faith and knowledge, sacred and profane, need one another and are dependent upon one another but are mutually exclusive in terms of their core essences. This metaphor reaches its limit quite quickly in any comparative study of identity and social formation. Hughes shows that in many instances, “it is impossible to sort through normative and non-normative groups, let alone to decide who took what from whom and when” (91). We form each other—a point that Habermas usually expresses better than most. Yet, as my comments here suggest, the imagining of one particular ritual context to be sacred (death rituals) while imagining others to be profane (economic exchange, fandom, sports) is less a function of the intrinsic meaning of those contexts, or even the native understanding of the participants, and more the activity of the scholar. It would very much seem that Habermas’s theoretical framework is an ingenious solution to conflagrations of faith and knowledge, recommending amiable post-secular reconciliation and respect, yet it is no less the work of a tribal theologian than that of the priest who proclaims a ritual to have failed for not having proceeded at the right moment.

With a more coherent and ordinary sense of what rituals do and what they accomplish, we can readily identify a number of functional equivalents: family life, social clubs, fandoms, political affiliations, and so on all have their own psychotropic mechanisms. The experiences of the rituals of everyday life cannot be studied in terms of weak and strong traditions. Any account of experience must be viewed as a political interpretation of experience supported by a range of social interests. We should probably speak more of cultures of interpretation than religious experiences in this sense. However, as long as religion is described in symbiotic terms as having an “opaque core of religious experience” that is “abysmally alien to discursive thought,” Habermas’s (2008: 143) conception elides the contingences of history and discursive social formation that serve as the constitutive interruptive elements of the narration of experience. In particular, he also elides the politics of the discourse on religion, as a discourse authorizing privilege in the name of religion.

Extraordinary communication and the transcendental social

In the context of human evolution and development, Habermas posits an intuitive distinction between the sacred and the profane prior to the development of propositionally differentiated speech. As I have attempted to show, as with the distinction between religion and non-religion, the distinction between ordinary and extraordinary communication is not straightforward. Whenever we assign status functions to people or things, we award them a transcendental status as well. This transcendental status forms the invisible halo of culture and will demonstrate non-instrumental characteristics. Any essentialization of identity is an extraordinary form of communication and these extraordinary forms take a myriad of familiar shapes from pretend play and games to taken for granted institutional structures (Rackoczy, 2007). These remarkable everyday imaginings create and sustain transcendental social networks that form the substrates of culture and encompass as part of its network all the things we typically associate with religion.

In Economy and Society, Max Weber offers an example of religiously or magically motivated behavior: a rainmaker performs simulative actions to evoke rain from the heavens. Weber notes that the rainmaker engages in purposive conduct. The action is thought to bring about a desire result.

Only we, judging from the standpoint of our modern views of nature, can distinguish objectively in such behavior those attributions of causality which are “correct” from those which are “fallacious,” and then designate the fallacious attributions of causality as irrational, and the corresponding acts as “magic.” (Weber, 1993: 2) ⁸

For Bloch, once we understand the nature of the transcendental social, we begin to understand and explain that which commonly passes for religion (or magic). What we typically call religion is part of a transcendental social network of essentialized identities and assigned status functions. Bloch’s account differs substantially from accounts of religion that distinguish between the natural and supernatural, aligning religion with the supernatural. The assigning of status functions marks the creation of a transcendental network of concepts. Such networks are thoroughly intersubjective, the result of joint forms of intentionality. Bloch (2013: 29) suggests the impossible claim “We have been here for 200 years” as illustrative of how a transcendental social comes to be layered on and negates an empirically based transactional social. Habermas’s claim that modern religious adherents have special access to archaic experience, as if somehow the Axial Age religions preserve an ahistorical mysterious essence, is analogous to the example Bloch offers.

The ubiquity of the transcendental social in human interactions makes it easy to miss and especially easy to misunderstand. Games are illustrative (Rakoczy, 2007). In an objective sense, there is no such thing as a goal. A goal is a social fact, resulting from the adoption of norms. Teams, players, coaches, and referees are all imaginary offices. Each in their own way points to nothing in particular. Pretend play, games, and rituals all share a self-referential quality, a quality sustained by a socially generated “as if.” In terms of the imagination, a pretend friend is not substantially different from an imagined interaction with a non-present colleague or ancestor. Until recently, we have tended to see these imagined interactions as utterly distinct. ⁹ Research on “serious play” points out that in ritual contexts, the distinction between fact and fantasy often becomes obviated (Luhrmann, 1989: 324–336; see also Luhrmann, 2012), a view consistent with Bloch’s analysis. Until recently, the usual response has been to claim that imaginary entities are only those that we know to be imagined since religious entities are believed they are excluded from research on the imagination. This position clearly does not hold up. Games are not real in any objective sense; they are fantasy creations that we act out. These are shared imaginary worlds (the best study of this is Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, 1990).

While we are still in the early stages of understanding the role of the imagination in everyday life, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that when human beings developed the capacity for design, pretense, and mental time travel, we entered a new era of sociability. Our ability to imagine other times and places also allows us to imagine occupying the mental space of other human beings. Pretense and mental time travel offers us the power to imagine entities without bodies, alternate worlds—the possible and impossible (Harris, 2000; Lillard, 2004; Suddendorf and Dong, 2013).

Pretend play, mental mapping, and mental time travel co-exist with our capacity for make-believe: our ability to imagine things not as they are. Such imaginings take many forms: imaginary companions (MacKendrick, 2012; Taylor, 1999), imaginary relationships (Gleason, 2013), imaginary interactions (Honeycutt, 2003), and imaginary worlds (Root-Bernstein, 2013), just to scratch the surface. They also include the creation of social norms, the assigning of status functions, and the maintaining of essentialized social roles. Such imaginings are concretized in a number of activities: pretend play, games, art, and ritual. Typically, many of our imagined interactions rely on props: the phone that we pretend is a banana, the bottle of water we use as a chess piece, the aesthetic representation in a painting, a uniform, or the chalice that symbolizes divinity. And while pretend play and make-believe is often uncoupled from reality, it rarely departs from serving some sort of social interest. Imaginary social worlds are both part of the world and uncoupled from it. I am unconvinced that “otherworldliness” is the best way to describe our social imaginings. As John Caughey (1984) rightly points out, even our wildest dreams tend to be firmly planted in the social world (see also Cohen and MacKeith, 1999).

Our capacity to imagine the impossible, to develop unrealistic solutions to real problems, likely came about with our capacity for pretense and mental time travel (Suddendorf, Addis, and Corballis, 2009; Suddendorf and Dong, 2013). The reflexive power of make-believe may have outmoded more realistic or so-called non-magical solutions to the difficult contingencies of everyday life. Anticipating the future by making use of the past is a highly adaptive and powerful developmental capacity. The development of episodic memory alongside language meets the requirements for the cultural evolution of propositionally differentiated communication (Tomasello, 2008, 2009). This view also accommodates Habermas’s interest in cyclical life patterns. As human beings developed a sense of past and future, their activities could begin to be shaped by recurring but occasional patterns (death, birth, illness). This view also accommodates the development of culture and social structure in the form of institutionalized norms (social roles, status functions).

At the same time, emphasis on the developmental imagination and our capacity to imagine alternatives avoids the questionable dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. As Kippenberg outlines, this dichotomy emerged out of a 19th-century tension between the religious and the political. Fabricating a concept of religion against the world solved a particular political problem. If religion was set against the world, it must have its own autonomy from history. The scholarly trend towards the historicizing of religion could be resisted by means of standing it up against reality. In one innovative interpretive gesture, religion-in-general became transcendent, ubiquitous, and universal (Kippenberg, 2002: 122–123; Masuzawa, 2005: 312–313). Given the political context of its theorization, we should be hesitant to accept the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane at face value.

One final remark is relevant. Habermas argues that normative rightness emerges from the energies of the sacred complex. If the sacred complex is infinitely more diffuse and unbounded than Habermas theorizes, where might we situate normative rightness? Again, studies in the developmental imagination might have an answer, and this answer may have links to ritual. In The Work of the Imagination, Paul Harris (2000: 158) presents evidence that children have acquired a generalized notion of obligation by age of two or three years old. Obligation is likely modeled on a pre-existing concept of constraint (if, then). According to Harris, children differentiate between several kinds of constraint, obligations imposed by peer agreement vs. adult authority or obligations imposed by social conventions vs. principles. The idea of constraint comes from our capacity to contrast what was done and what was not done. For any given action, children often conceive of a counter-factual alternative, a scenario in which some alternative action was carried out (Harris, 2000: 159; see also Byrne, 2005). As children learn different kinds of constraints (peer agreement, adult authority, physical laws), they come to appreciate that different choices have different outcomes: order, disorder, approval, disapproval. The idea of obligation may be derived from the recognition that social cooperation is the result of communicative decision-making processes and that these processes are unavoidable.

Concluding remarks

The invention of religion, which carries the taxon of world religions and how to recognize them, becomes less a description of religion and more a prescription of what proper world religions ought to look like. Today, religions are often evaluated on the basis of what and how they believe. Likewise, emphasis on religious experience often remains a defining characteristic of the scholarly study of religion in many quarters. Indeed, it remains a key part of Habermas’s understanding of religion as well, even if he is reticent to say much about it. In most instances, such experience is defined in terms of sectarian privacy and communal acts of solidarity, the mana or experiential power of religion. The political qualities and historical contexts of experience deemed to be religious are rendered invisible. More importantly, the historiography of religion is also rendered invisible to make way for the guiding lights of faith and knowledge.

In order to programmatically rethink religion without religion (to think without using or endorsing the classical modernist category religion), a wide range of concepts must be re-theorized. What I am proposing is tentative and needs to be worked out systematically. Drawing on the work of Maurice Bloch as a starting point, I am hoping to initiate a more critical consideration of religion as an aspect of a larger transcendental social—a frame perhaps best approached using tools development by scholars of the imagination.

Bloch proposes that religion is best understood in the context of the emergence of the imagination. Once human beings developed the ability to pretend, to act in the world in a way that it is not, the world of status functions and social norms began to take root. It is our capacity to imagine and essentialize roles that laid the groundwork for what Bloch calls the transcendental social. The transcendental social refers to the network of social facts or conventions. It is the network of expectations, roles, and essential characteristics that we assume things or people to have regardless of their empirical qualities. Bloch gives the example of a village elder who, as elder, is treated as an ancestor and presides over the ritual life of the village. Despite being a feeble old man, the elder is treated with great respect. This transcendental social is an imaginary world of assigned norms and stands in contrast to what he calls the transactional social, the instrumental forms of interaction. We stand in both worlds, often shifting seamlessly between them (for studies of this kind of shifting, see Cusack, 2010; Gill, 2000; Luhrmann, 1989).

In proposing that we think about history and social formation in relation to the imagination, I am not proposing a more objective definition of religion but a conception of religion in relation to a field of study most often ignored by scholars of religion (philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians). Definitions are neither true nor false but more or less useful (or interesting). The advantage of Bloch’s account is that it locates religion in culture and sees religion as something ordinary. There is no hint of religious exceptionalism. For Bloch, what we call religion is simply a transcendental social network, a sophisticated web of norms and expectations.

This proposal is in sharp contrast to Habermas’s understanding of religion as possessing an irreducible kernel of experience that responds to the contingencies of life and death. The promise of salvation, for Habermas, separates religion from all other cultural formations. This conception of religion is difficult to dissociate from a covert apologetic tendency; the writings of Troeltsch may be taken to be a prototypical example.

To be sure, I have left untouched the political and normative claims associated with a voluntarily or involuntary religious identity in a constitutional state. Even if we agree that the classical conception of religion is a category with an expired shelf life, this does not change the institutional status of religion in contemporary democratic societies. What these cautionary descriptions should do, however, is draw attention to the normative work that goes into identifying a tradition or a person as religious. These debates are coming to a head, rightly so. Fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists alike have been using the political protections afforded to religion for their own political and social comforts. Dissent and grievances about these comforts is widespread. Jediism, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and Discordianism cannot simply be viewed as gimcrack. These social formations have fashioned themselves after a definition of religion created and maintained by the classical conception of religion. Religion today has very little in common with what is too often assumed to be its continuous past.

Thinking about religion in the context of the imagination suggests that instead of using the Axial Age as a starting point for the genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking in relation to religious faith and secular knowledge, we should be looking further back to the dawn of the imagination and the human capacity for pretense, mental time travel, and the assigning of status functions. Each of these capacities underlines our ability to live cooperatively in a largely imagined social world (Bloch, 2013; Rakoczy, 2007; Tomasello, 2008). As Bloch argues, once we understand that the things we typically associate with religion are rooted in a transcendental social network, we can better appreciate the tremendous scope and power of the imaginary in every aspect of our social relations. Addressing this power, Kendall Walton (1990: 68) puts it concisely: “objectivity, control, the possibility of joint participation, spontaneity, all on top of a certain freedom from the cares of the world: it looks as though make-believe has everything” (see also Singer and Singer, 1990). To be sure, the human imagination has an unmistakable capacity for generating solidarity, sustaining norms, and providing meaning in ways that we are only now beginning to understand and, importantly, relate to a wide range of social formations and discourses.