What makes Critical Religion critical? A response to Russell McCutcheon

“Chapter 6. On Concepts and Entitles: Varieties of Critical Scholarship”

In his book chapter criticizing CRR, McCutcheon contrasts the journal with the critical religion group (https://criticalreligion.org), which is housed at the University of Sterling in the UK:

For in the journal, we see not a focus on the origins, effects, and limits of the categories, as with the UK group, but instead, the term ‘religion’ is simply used to name what are taken to be religious things, in an effort not to identify the ideological nature of religion per se (as, for example, with earlier, so-called Marxist thought), but to distinguish better religion from worse, all in the service of achieving the group’s self-described emancipatory agenda. (McCutcheon 2018, 97)

McCutcheon (2018, 98) objects to what he perceives as a universalistic claim in the editorials about what constitutes a critical approach when in the aims and scope it states that “A critical approach examines…”. CRR does not intend to be universalistic; there are a variety of critical approaches, but even critical religion, with its focus on post-colonialism and Orientalism, examines the category of religion according to its “positive and negative impacts” and is concerned about the use of it “as a source of domination and progressive social change.” What McCutcheon takes issue with is that the editorials advocate an evaluation of both the positive and negative impacts of religion, a practice he characterizes as “fault finding in order to improve” (98–99). For him, critique should be confined to a critique of the category of religion alone. He sees the scholar of religion as a social critic who works

at a distance from the situation under analysis, historicizing the items he or she may study, and thereby examine their conditions, workings, and effects—doing so regardless whether the scholar feels anything from … sentiments of affinity to estrangement toward the situation or people under examination. (99)

McCutcheon takes issue with seeing critical theology as a critical academic approach that deserves space in the journal (McCutcheon 2018, 100). This comes out of his own self-understanding as a religious studies scholar and his affiliation with the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and, in particular, the North American Association for the Study of Religion (NAASR). Religious Studies, which emerged out of theology, has had ongoing battles in its separation from its parent discipline. ⁵ Those of us in the social sciences (like sociology and anthropology), since our disciplines have more secular roots, do not have the same concerns. While I am in agreement with the more social scientific methodologies of religious studies, the study of theology (including critical theology) is necessary for the understanding of religion. For McCutcheon, being critical means “subjecting participant claims to naturalistic analysis and theorizing the possible mundane cause of experience claimed to be religious” (100). He distinguishes that activity with the position of the editorials which he characterizes as “criticizing views and modes of social organization with which we disagree so as to establish an order conducive to our interests” (100). First, it is not the interests of us, as editors. It is up to the author to decide what they want to critique and on what basis. The critique need not be explicit but if it is indeed critical, it is always implicit (as is the case of McCutcheon’s own work and that of critical religion). It is shaped by what we choose to examine, the angle from which we approach it, and the questions which we ask.

To back himself up, McCutcheon quotes from members of Culture on the Edge, who claim that critique can be non-normative

akin to the notion of historicization, denoting a scholarly attitude in which our work rigorously examines the situation and consequences, taking seriously the human and happenstance, examining the contingent and the always interested basis of claims of identity and place. (Martin et al. 2014, 300 quoted in McCutcheon 2018, 301)

McCutcheon does not think that “a doctorate in the academic study of religion” qualifies him “to diagnose society’s ills” (emphasis added) (101). Here he assumes that we are all religious studies PhDs; I am not. For many sociologists like myself, diagnosing society’s ills is precisely the purpose of the discipline. It is not clear what McCutcheon thinks is the purpose of the religious studies scholar. Is it to merely understand religion (or rather the category) and then what? Again McCutcheon (2018, 102) quotes the Culture on the Edge symposium,

This suggests that scholars can examine not why religion is either right or wrong, valid or invalid, thereby avoiding questions of how to improve or dispense with it; instead they can work to see how those elements of culture named religion function with regard to other segments of the larger cultural world in order to make possible and credible the various regime of truth that are presupposed in the traditional tennis match of inside vs. outside and reformer vs. critic. (Martin et al. 2014, 300)

What McCutcheon really objects to is that CRR has encouraged the “evaluation” of religious ideas, practices, and institutions. He confines himself solely to critiquing the category (but not the thing in itself). He is concerned with the questions of: who judges? By what scale? (McCutcheon 2018, 102). He is afraid that we do so merely according to our own interests (100) which may be opposed to those of others. He accuses of us “policing the limits of critique” (102). To this, I respond that we are not doing much policing, that we are very happy to get submissions, and that unlike McCutcheon, we are very loose in what we accept as critical, having published not only McCutcheon and his colleagues but theologians and rational choice theorists alike.

Somehow McCutcheon thinks that Timothy Fitzgerald’s “historical deconstruction of religion” (103) aligns with a non-normative approach, while Fitzgerald (2016, 311) acknowledges that he is value-driven. McCutcheon (2018, 103) takes issue with CRR’s “emancipatory and political” agenda, which he sees as lodged within “the project of modernity.” Yet, his opposition to it is equally as much of a value-laden position—what scholars of religion ought to be doing. He thinks that the project of the journal has no place in the academy but is better done by scholars “when they’re off the clock” (103). We do not only publish authors in the academy but independent scholars outside of it. And to think that scholars should be restricted in taking value positions in what they write because they are on payroll is equally as absurd and not grounded in the reality of what most scholars actually publish. And when are academics ever off the clock when they write? In taking such a position, McCutcheon seems to go against the very purpose of public intellectuals.

Some of McCutcheon’s other work

In advocating a non-normative approach, McCutcheon grounds himself in some of his earlier works as well as some of his colleagues in the critical religion camp who he cites. Upon close examination, all of their work is indeed value-laden and normative. Indeed, there are so many value-laden statements in McCutcheon’s own work and those of his colleagues that due to limitations of space, I cannot go through all of them. So, what I shall do is pick out the most obvious and point out how they are not simply value-laden but value-driven.

The title of McCutcheon’s first book Manufacturing Religion (which came out of his doctoral dissertation) is a play upon none other than Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988). It is hard to think of a public intellectual housed in the academy who does not have an emancipatory and progressive agenda more than Chomsky (see McCutcheon 1997, viii). Indeed, what McCutcheon takes aim at in this book is the sui generis claim about religion by the phenomenologist Mircea Eliade, one which sees religion as autonomous and irreducible. According to McCutcheon, “the category of religion functions as an ideological construct that deflects attention from the way in which it maintains social privilege” (31). This understanding of religion, according to McCutcheon, functions to prevent its discourse from being subject to “critical scrutiny” in order to maintain its hegemony (68). It camouflages its “political statements as if they were neutral, factual, and purely descriptive statements of supposedly self-evident meaning and value” (71). McCutcheon explores Eliade’s fascist associations during his youth (79–83) and characterizes sui generis claims about religion which support “the dominant power structures” as “idealist,” “anti-modernist,” and “politically conservative.” Against this view of religion, he provides what he describes as a “materialistic and naturalistic” critique which not only contextualizes this idealism, but in the act of contextualizing it, deauthorizes and challenges it (29). In other words, from McCutcheon’s perspective, Eliade’s conception of religion is idealist and conservative; it maintains social privilege and hegemony, that is it supports dominant power structures. Through critique of Elliade’s understanding of religion, McCutcheon seeks to challenge it. Underlying McCutcheon’s objection to Eliade’s sui generis conception of religion are certain values, not simply a quest for truth but an objection of Eliade’s position in relation to the hegemonic order. This sounds like an emancipatory agenda, but one confined to the narrow constraints of religious studies.

In an essay original published in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion but revised in a collection of essays titled Critics not Caretakers, McCutcheon (2001) articulates what the “scholar of religion as public intellectual” ought to be doing. In the essay, McCutcheon (129) argues that critical intelligence requires a refrain from engaging in “normative guidance,” in distinguishing between “good from bad or normal from abnormal religion.” While appreciating the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, McCutcheon’s (134) understanding of the role of a public intellectual is different. “The scholar of religion as critical rhetor instead exposes the mechanisms whereby these very truths and norms are constructed in the first place, demonstrating the contingency of seemingly necessary conditions and the historical character of ahistorical claims.” McCutcheon clarifies, that rather than making normative claims, the critical scholar seeks to deconstruct them. For McCutcheon (135), “the scholar of religion as critical rhetor comes not to inform the world of how it ought to work, but explains how and why it happens to work as it does.” The role of the critical scholar of religion, according to McCutcheon, is not evaluative but explanatory. Paradoxically, the scholar of religion ought to explain but ought not to make ought statements. They ought not to make claims that are liberal or conservative or “in support of dominant or oppositional regimes.” In doing this, he says that he is not advocating that the role of the intellectual should be “dispassionate, objective observer.” Nor does he advocate that one should “abandon their own normative convictions” (138). McCutcheon recognizes that it is naïve to claim that normative claims would disappear. Rather he seeks to generate “critical, scholarly theories about normative discourses.” He does not see “normative reflection” as “inherently problematic” and concedes that it may be “inevitable.” He claims that his scholarship aims to contextualize “normative, dehistoricized discourses” and “redescribe them as human constructs” (139). In this, McCutcheon contradicts himself. He describes his approach as non-normative, yet he concedes that it is impossible not to be normative. He characterizes this approach not as oppositional while it seeks to deconstruct normative systems. And he says that the scholar of religion should refrain from making normative evaluations of religions as good or bad, but while advocating is statements and admonishing ought statements (140), he has no restraint in telling other scholars of religion what they ought to do. McCutcheon says that “the role of the public intellectual requires us consistently to lay bare these mechanisms of power and control” (141). It is not for us to act as “caretakers for religion.” Again, contradicting himself, he says the role of uncovering “rhetorical and ideological window dressing” is indeed “oppositional.” While McCutcheon advocates deconstructing the norms guiding others, he seems reluctant to recognize his own. So, his description of his own position as non-normative is a misnomer. Underlying his advocacy of the deconstruction of norms are indeed norms. But he does not self-reflect on what they are.

Another essay in the same volume on “Our ‘Special Promise’ as Teachers” is equally as contradictory. While still admonishing scholars from evaluating aspects of religion as good or bad, McCutcheon (2001, 170) acknowledges that he has no qualms about distinguishing between good and bad scholarship. He separates good scholars from good citizens without seeing the interconnection between the two. McCutcheon seems to conflate the value-driven approach that we have advocated in the editorials, with universal timeless principles of Eliade’s sui generis religion, Diana Eck’s religious pluralism, or theology in general. In arguing that critical approaches are value-driven, I recognize that these values are constructed (in an ideal typical sense) and historically located. But as such, they serve as methodological tools for comparison. So, for example, in analyzing gender inequality among certain religious groups, the value of equality always stands in the background. Paradoxically, McCutcheon in his so-called non-normative approach thinks that the task of a scholar is to “deprivilege” and thus act as a “social provocateur” (174–175). While I don’t disagree with this understanding what the role of the critical scholar should be, positioning oneself against privilege strikes me as very value-laden.

In The Discipline of Religion, McCutcheon’s advocacy of refrain from evaluating continues:

We must be wary of simply invoking our authority as careful hermeneuts to elevate one interpretive frame above the rest, as if we are in the position to declare which meaning is right and which is wrong for, in so doing, we are engaged in the self-serving activity of declaring one among many social worlds as right, truthful, normative and all others as wrong. (2003, 22–23)

In Religion and the Domestication of Dissent (2005), McCutcheon says that academics should engage in observation but not evaluation. They ought not to assess whether something is good or not but rather they should be “disinterested observers” (5). Along the same lines, he writes that “the task of scholarship is not to be ‘in touch’ with the people under study, not to validate them or to pompously feel their pain, whether or not one has affinity for them.” He thinks that not subjecting “the descriptive data to theoretical analysis” results in uncritically adopting the subject’s view of themselves and is a form of chauvinism on the part of the intellectual (31).

In his chapter criticizing the editorials, McCutcheon also points to chapter 7 of his co-authored work with William Arnal (Arnal and McCutheon 2013) as a place where he has already explained his position. In this chapter, they argue that only by “anchoring human action in the mundane, historical world of interests and contests” can scholarship steer clear of “unreflectively reproducing participants interests and self-understandings” (130–131). Craig Martin (2015c) explains how this relates to values in the exchange published in the Religion Bulletin where he sees values as being reducible to interests. Surely, values are driven by interests but they are not reducible to them alone. Interests can be more mundane, whereas values reflect higher aspirations. One can hold values which are not immediately in one’s own self-interest. I agree with this materialist approach to understand religion of McCutcheon and Arnal, but I don’t see how this claim in this chapter contradicts that critique is and ought to be value-driven. In fact, in other parts of the book, Arnal and McCutcheon’s positions are ideological and based on values.

In the Introduction, Arnal and McCutcheon write that “the mission of scholarship is not to reproduce the process” of the bureaucratization and globalization of what Foucault described as governmentalité, but to historicize it. Behind this process, which “has legitimized certain types of subjects and specific types of social relations” hides sui generis religion (15). Here again, McCutcheon (and Arnal) seem to think that historicization is somehow non-normative.

Arnal and McCutcheon’s (2013, 107) lack of a non-normative or value-free position becomes explicit when, following Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), they write that the point of religious studies is to process “data generated by the colonial project” and by doing so “the scholar is deeply implicated in the mechanisms of the imperial state.” They think that the concept of “world religions” provides “a case study of how power and identity are negotiated by means of classification” (Arnal and McCutcheon 2013, 50).

Their sharpest critique in the book, however, is reserved for Disney. The sociopolitical effect of the type of utopia that Disney creates is “ultimately conservative” (62). Disney, in their words, is “simultaneously a manifestation of and a propagandistic ode to American capitalism” (70); it “serves the social order rather than threatening it” (65). The depiction of Disney is negative and in doing so, Arnal and McCutcheon are not simply disinterested scholars but rather sounding somewhat Marxian portray Disney as the essence of “commodity fetishism” and “consumer capitalism” (70).

In other essays in Fabricating Religion, McCutcheon further clarifies his position against making normative claims concerning religion. McCutcheon takes issue with scholars such as Juliane Hammer who in a 2016 roundtable on normativity in Islamic Studies in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion argued that “‘all scholarship is based on normative claims and assumptions’” (Hammer 2016, 26–27 quoted in McCutcheon 2018, 86). McCutcheon’s objection is to normative claims evaluating religious actors, beliefs, and institutions. He is opposed to scholars “who wish to dabble in social engineering” (71). He does not want to criticize religious conservatives, the orthodox, or fundamentalists. McCutcheon concedes he has “interests, investments, and a viewpoint” (77). But he claims that his normative claims are limited to how the field of religious studies ought to work (72).

It is easy for McCutcheon not to want to criticize religious actors. He does not live in places like Iran or Nigeria (from where interestingly CRR has received many submissions). McCutcheon’s critique, as he clarifies, is over the scholarship on religion and on the category of religion, but not on religion itself, that is he engages in a critique of religious studies but not in a critique of religion. This fits into CRR but is only one narrow aspect of it; there are many others. It is not us as editors who engage in the critiques of religion; it is the authors who come from many different societies and cultures. For instance, in this issue there is a critique of student chapters of the Basij, a right-wing paramilitary organization in Iran, as a fundamentalist organization, which is written by four scholars at an Iranian university. It is not us as editors who are making the critique but the authors who live in the Islamic Republic. Our goals at CRR are to give voice to these authors who for political reasons were unable to find a venue for it in Iran.

Other critical religion scholars

Not all those within the critical religion camp are in agreement that the scholar should be non-normative in their critique of religion. Granted, the introduction to the Culture on the Edge symposium in CRR (Martin et al. 2014) sides with McCutcheon on this issue, and Craig Martin (2015a, 299) thinks that it is possible to have a non-normative definition of the category of religion. To achieve this, it would have to be a “second order, analytical term, rather than … a rhetorical weapon.” On the other hand, Timothy Fitzgerald, who was part of a group at the University of Sterling which originally coined the term critical religion, and has used it to describe his own position, does not seem himself as value neutral (2015, 303; 2016, 311). He thinks that the claim to produce objective, neutral, and disinterested knowledge is a fiction (2016, 313) and that “the appeal to make the values in our arguments explicit is a good one” (310). He wonders whether critical religion has outlasted its usefulness. Concerned with the lack of boundaries between religion and politics, he thinks that “critical modern categories” might be a better term (2016, 309). He writes that “academics and their universities have a potentially powerful role to play in the subversion of core beliefs of secular liberal and neoliberal modernity” (2015, 316). Critical religion, for him “challenges the 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” (305). Indeed, one of the tasks of Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies is to analyze the role played by the category of religion in the formation of the secular that is part of the “mystifying project of Western imperialism,” which disguises exploitation and inequality (Fitzgerald 2000, 15).

Another book that is illustrative of how the critique of the category of religion is implicitly value-driven is Richard King’s Orientalism and Religion. The leitmotif behind King’s book is Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. One of the definitions for Orientalism that Said provides is “‘a Western style for dominating, restricting and having authority over the Orient’” (Said cited in King 1999, 83). For King (1999, 40), religion “is a Christian theological category” tied to the West. He uses a Foucauldian “genealogical approach” in an attempt to shed light on the relationship between power and knowledge in the imposition of what constitutes religion over non-Western societies (61, 131). These relationships of power and knowledge maintain “an asymmetrical relationship” between the powerful and the powerless (187). By doing so, he wishes to preserve “indigenous perspective” against the “hegemony” and Eurocentrism of the Western academy (61). What is illuminating in King’s study is not just that the idea of what constitutes religion was not just imposed through colonialism but (as in the case of Hinduism or Zen Buddhism) is also adapted by indigenous cultures, sometimes in a counter-hegemonic form (106, 112, 117). Sympathizing with Hans Georg Gadamer, he finds the notion of “objective and value-free interpretation” as “inherently problematic” (73).

Likewise, in Jason Ananda Josephson’s study, The Invention of Religion in Japan, religion is a “Eurocentric term” used to describe similarities to European Christianity (2012, 9). Like King, Josephson sees the imposition of the category of religion on Japan as a two-way process in which the Japanese “made the discourse of ‘religion’ its own” (4). Josephson does not merely see his study as “a narrative of oppression or hegemony” (21). The term religion arose through a “contested” and “negotiated process” marked by “asymmetries of power” (5, 92). He frames his discussion in “poststructuralist notions of language,” that is “the connection between power and discourse” (78). Like his colleagues in Culture on the Edge, Josephson reiterates the Foucauldian notion that “regimes of truth” maintain themselves through power/knowledge relationships (136). For him, Orientalism, which is a “discourse of colonialism, understood as domination” applies only partly to Japan since it was never fully colonized (193). Indeed, Japanese intellectuals constructed Shintoism as secular and counter-hegemonic (247). In doing so, the very category of religion became “de-Christianized” (249).

Tomoko Masuzawa sees her book The Invention of World Religions as a “critical investigation” or “critical history” (2005, 9, 10, 32). She says that the discourse on religion(s) is “a vital operating system within the colonial discourse of Orientalism” (31). Her book focuses on the development of the notion of world religions, how original articulations of it were Eurocentric and hegemonic based on the assumption of “Euro-Christian supremacy.” Much of it was based on European (and particularly) German racist theory of the Indo-Germanic and Semitic races, which separated Christianity from Judaism and Islam. The book shows how the discourse on world religion became transformed into a more universalistic pluralistic conception of world religions (70, 213, 223–234, 241, 244, 326–327). Masuzawa points out that scholarship making assumptions of European and Christian superiority are “value-laden” and that they would embarrass the contemporary “pluralistic” world religions discourse (102–103). But she wonders whether, considering its origins and development, the current world religions pluralistic discourse can be trusted (326). She writes,

If we are to be serious in our critical intention, the exorcism of an undead Christian absolutism would not suffice. Instead, criticism calls for something far more laborious, tedious, and difficult, a rigorous historical investigation that does not superstitiously yield to the comforting belief in the liberating power of “historical consciousness.” We must attend to the blackfolds, the billowing, and the living lining of the fabric of history we unfurl, the story we tell from time to time to put ourselves to sleep. This is one of the reasons historiography must always include the historical analysis of our discourse itself. (328)

Conclusion

While it was Wilfred Cantwell Smith and J.Z. Smith who first called into question the category of religion, it is Talal Asad (1993, 29, 54) who takes Edward Said’s genealogical approach, borrowed from Foucault with its application toward Orientalism, and uses it to question our understanding of religion. Not only McCutcheon, but the other authors of the critical religion camp discussed in this response (Fitzgerald, King, Josephson, and Masuzawa) use this framework in historically deconstructing the category of religion. It is only McCutcheon (and the Culture on the Edge Group), however, who takes a non-normative position (or rather pretend to do so). Fitzgerald acknowledges that he is value-driven while the rest do not address the issue. Regardless, in their very approach to the category of religion, combining the genealogical and power/discourse analysis of Foucault with the Orientalism of Said, all of the scholars using a critical religion approach are value-driven or normative. Orientalism, according to Said ([1978] 1994, 246), asserts the “technological, political, and cultural supremacy of the West.” Underlying it is an “ontological inequality of Occident and Orient” (150). Their analysis is shaped by and saturated with such terms as imperialism, colonialism, and hegemony. There are concerned about the inequality of power relations between the Christian Occident and the colonized or post-colonized Orient.

To justify his position, McCutcheon (2003, 287) quotes Michel Foucault, who says that the role of the intellectual should not be in telling others what to do:

The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ political will; it is through the analyses that he carries out in his own field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions and on the basis of this re-problematization (in which he carries out his specific task as an intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play). (Foucault 1988a, 265 cited in McCutcheon 2003, 288)

Foucault was not non-normative or value-neutral, nor did he think that the intellectual should not evaluate aspects of religion as good or bad. He embraced the Islamism of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a new form of “political spirituality,” a position that would “come back to haunt him” after the regime stripped women of their rights and executed homosexuals (Afary and Anderson 2005, 3, 91, 93, 99).

Foucault’s very notion of critique is value-laden. For him, “a preliminary definition of critique” is “the art of not being governed so much” (Foucault 1996, 384). “Critique is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth” (386). Underlying this opposition to the nexus of truth and power in the service of governmentality are the underlying principles of equality and the desire for freedom. What makes Foucault’s work critical is that it has an “emancipatory agenda.”

In calling scholars not to evaluate whether aspects of religion are good or bad, whether explicitly or implicitly, McCutcheon borders on the nihilism of Nietzsche, whose genealogical method provided a model for Foucault. However, as shown, McCutcheon’s non-normative position is indeed normative. The fact that McCutcheon and his colleagues are guided by values is what makes their critical religion critical. If it was not for a concern with unequal power relations which have been a result of imperialism, colonialism, and hegemony or simply “privilege,” there would be no critique (criticism) of the category of religion and how it is embedded in these power relations. To criticize, to critique, is to hold humans and their actions to a higher set of ideals, which are ultimately based on values (whatever they may be), values of truth, equality, freedom, democracy, and justice, among others. These values are historically situated and contingent; they therefore are contested and subject to revision, but understandings of them evolve as societies develop, thus they are potentially emancipatory. However, this does not prevent the scholar from constructing them as ideal types and using them to guide their research. When we criticize, when we critique, we do it on a certain basis, whether we recognize it or not. While critical religion wants us to become self-aware of our use of the category of religion, CRR is much broader; its aim is to facilitate not only the critique of the category but to that which the category refers, not only a critique of religion but critiques that religion(s) may offer of society.