William Arnal, Russell T. McCutcheon - The Sacred Is The Profane - The Political Nature of - Religion - Oxford University Press (2012) PDF

The Sacred Is the Profane
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The Sacred Is the
Profane
The Political Nature of “Religion”
z
WILLIAM E. ARNAL
RUSSELL T. McCUTCHEON
1
1
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For Willi Braun . . .
il miglior fabbro
“ . . . little will be gained by reinstating
the old hierarchy by way of the back door.”
—Jonathan Z. Smith (2004d: 145)
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Sources xvii
Introduction: On the Persistence of Imagining Religion 1
1. On the Definition of Religion 17
2. Words, Words, Wordbooks, or Everything Old Is New Again 31
3. Contemporary Reinventions of Religion: Disney and the Academy 57
4. “Just Follow the Money”: The Cold War, the Humanistic Study
of Religion, and the Fallacy of Insufficient Cynicism 72
5. Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture? 91
6. Maps of Nothing in Particular: Religion as a Cross-cultural Taxon 102
7. “They Licked the Platter Clean”: On the Codependency of the

Religious and the Secular 114
8. The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, “Religion”:

A Case Study 134
Afterword 171
Notes 175
References 215
Index 233
Preface
near the end of his visit to the continent of Africa in 2009—or, taking the lead
from the Vatican’s designation of “apostolic journey,” what the press simply called
his “pilgrimage”—Pope Benedict 16th relied on the well-established distinction
between magic and religion when speaking to a group of Church bishops, priests,
and nuns during an invitation-only mass at St. Paul’s Church in Luanda, Angola.
As quoted in The New York Times and confirmed by the Vatican’s website, the Pope
closed his homily by focusing the faithful’s attention on those at risk because they
have not yet heard the Church’s message, posing to his congregation the following
rhetorical question: “Who can go to them to proclaim that Christ has triumphed
over death and all those occult powers?”1
The strategic pairing of licit/illicit, which Benedict used to distinguish those
practices termed sorcery from what he termed the Christian religion, has a long
history of usage with which scholars of religion are more than familiar. It is impor-
tant to bear in mind when studying those who divide up their social world in this
way the principle that, after describing the participant’s own use of such designa-
tors, scholarship requires us to redescribe all such first- order or folk classification
systems, seeing them as instances of other, far wider, cross-cultural or historical
processes—processes that do not necessarily share a common identity but which,
instead, serve as analogies exemplary of something that the scholar finds curious.
In the case of the Pope’s distinction between false sorcery and true religion, fol-
lowing this principle would be relatively uncontroversial for the majority of schol-
ars—those who would undoubtedly advise that we would be terribly mistaken to
begin our study of the Pope’s address by assuming that, for example, the category
“sorcery” referred to something substantial and thus distinguishable in the acts
being signified; instead, such scholars would likely advise us to see in such clas-
sification systems evidence of a set of prior social interests that the speaker was
putting into practice by means of such bounded pairs as pure/impure or magic/
religion—interests that, in this case, had something to do not only with the goal
of reinvigorating the collective identity of those Angolans in attendance but also
inspiring them to work toward the elimination of this very social distinction
x Preface
through what is known locally as proselytization. For in this way, the superstitious
“them” would, God willing, someday be converted to a totalized “us.”
As Émile Durkheim might have concluded a hundred years ago, through their
participation in the ritual known locally as a mass, the so-called “heroic and holy
heralds of God,” as Benedict phrased it, became unified insomuch as they could
understand those within eyesight and earshot as clearly distinguishable from
those not in attendance, the ones living in the fearful grip of magic. When rede-
scribed in this manner, the address that the Vatican and the press alike termed a
homily ends up being but one species of the far wider genus popularly known as a
pep talk, akin to the sort of rousing speech that might be delivered by an inspiring
coach prior to the big game, creating a shared sense of affinity among members of
the home team by juxtaposing them to a caricature of their cross-town rivals.
But what makes the report of the Pope’s pep talk stand out for us was not
because it illustrated so well that much is at stake in the designators that scholars
use when studying people’s behaviors—though we learn much by substituting
the more generally applicable (and thus comparatively useful) “visit,” “audience,”
“tourism,” and “pep talk” for the participant’s own choice of “apostolic journey,”
“congregation,” “pilgrimage,” and “homily.” Moving beyond mere descriptions of
the first-order discourse’s characteristics, such substitutions (or what Jonathan Z.
Smith called “redescriptions”) demonstrate nicely that seemingly unlike first-order
things can be profitably compared in light of a second-order curiosity—a curiosity
more than likely alien to the people under study. Instead of this, what merits atten-
tion in this one example is how difficult it would likely be to get those scholars
of religion who so easily see through Benedict’s transparent distinction between
magic and religion to also historicize the conceptual distinctions that provide the
enabling conditions of their own work, not the least being the sacred/secular pair-
ing that animates our use of the category “religion” (i.e., the very conditions that
enable them to assume that Pope Benedict is a religious leader). For, much like the
term “apostolic journey,” the category “religion” (and by this we mean not simply
the word but the assumption that so-called religious things, whether objects or
feelings, are somehow naturally set apart from other sorts of things and feelings)
is a local designator, peculiar to certain historical periods and specific groups of
human beings—although, unlike “apostolic journey,” it is one that people world-
wide have adopted (no doubt grudgingly in some cases) and elevated to the status
of a cross-cultural universal. That is, while many of us, as scholars, would judge it
insufficient for a scholar to be content with merely describing the Pope’s rhetoric,
or worse yet, simply to adopt it and then try to identify the supposedly magical
qualities inherent in those illicit practices that so concerned him, we nonetheless
find in the work of some who claim to be historicizing the category “religion” no
less troublesome assumptions concerning the stubborn significance that some-
how remains even after we dispense with our Latin-derived signifier—a stubborn
Preface xi
significance that, for example, helps us to see people like Benedict, and the socio-
political institution that he represents, as someone worth paying attention to for
some special reason. Thus, despite the now commonly accepted practice of his-
toricizing the word “religion,” and the now widely accepted habit of placing it in
quotation marks, we often find in such work that some prior, persistent concept
ends up being naturalized, despite the supposedly rigorous attention to history
(see Riesebrodt 2010).
Because we find this sort of work to fall considerably short of what we think a
scholar ought to be doing, the following volume considers this strategically partial
historicization and aims to elaborate, document, and suggest alternatives to the
local, historically specific, and politically charged concept of “religion” as it is used
in academic discourse. This aim, we hope, is clearly communicated in our choice
of title for this book; for by eliminating Mircea Eliade’s conjunction “and” in his
well-known title, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, we intend to
dispel the notion that these two designators name separate domains that somehow
interact from time to time. Some of this material has appeared in print before, and
some is previously unpublished, but all of it seemed to reflect a convergence of sen-
sibilities between the two authors—each trained in rather different data domains
(i.e., Arnal: Christian origins; McCutcheon: history of the academic study of reli-
gion) but both sharing the same theoretical commitments and curiosities (nicely
illustrating, we think, that curiosities and assumptions, rather than data, unite
scholars). The essays therefore seemed to embody a sufficiently coherent perspec-
tive on the problem of the category “religion” as to merit publication as a single vol-
ume under both of our names. Although all of the chapters were originally written
by one or the other of us, our use of first-person plural pronouns throughout makes
evident that they have all been rewritten, to varying degrees, by both authors.
After a substantive introduction that sketches the problem that we tackle in this
volume, chapter 1 considers the problems associated with defining the concept of
“religion,” which must serve as a precondition for any coherent study; it argues
that the search for a consistent academic definition has so far been in vain, and that
there are good reasons for this failure. Chapter 2 turns from one word (“religion”)
to several, exploring the ways in which recent “handbooks” for the study of reli-
gion shape the field in their selection and construction of key analytic concepts,
including, of course, religion itself. The chapter shows that despite a token prob-
lematizing of “religion” as a category, the field of religious studies (as reflected in
these discipline-defining handbooks) remains amorphous, and—perhaps more
significantly—that this amorphous shape is rationalized by reference to some kind
of natural or human reality “out there” or “in here” that is presumed to be simply
too complex for our methods to apprehend. Thus there emerges a continued com-
mitment to interpretive and appreciative approaches to religion, deeply entwined
with the persistence of the conception of “religion” as a bounded category.
xii Preface
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 narrow the focus somewhat and look at the ways in which
contemporary practices and discourses shape “religion” both as a folk taxon and
an academic area of study. Chapter 3 argues that “religion,” although an early
modern political construction in its origins, is continually reconstructed and rein-
forced in cultural practices that one would not normally regard to be “religious.”
Specifically, an analogy is found between the segregation imposed on personal
ends in the makeup of Disney World and the segregation imposed on such ends
by the category of “religion.” Two points emerge from this comparison: first, that
the kind of analysis that applies to “religion” can also be applied to “nonreligious”
objects; and second, that “religion” retains its political functionality and a defin-
ing “other” to the secular state even in the present day. Chapter 4, building on
this political focus, shows how the humanistic study of religion (as opposed to
confessional, openly theological approaches) as it developed in the 1960s was
encouraged by a series of political factors, including the launch of Sputnik, the
Cold War, and judicial decisions about the scope and interpretation of the first
amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “Religion” understood as a cross-cultural,
deeply interior aspect of our common humanity turns out to be, at least in part, an
academic construction of the Cold War—rather mundane origins for such a sup-
posedly deeply meaningful pursuit. Chapter 5 focuses on how the most important
recent developments in the study of religion (i.e., cognitive approaches to religion)
once again represent a scholarly endorsement and reinscription of a folk category
whose primary utilities remain political, local, and contingent. The cognitive turn
may not, as it happens, solve the problems associated with religion as a category,
or make those problems go away.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 represent efforts to engage with current scholarship on
religion and to reinforce the inadequacy of assumptions that “religion” can be
used as a concept, if it is used with rigor and care. Chapter 6 looks at the debate on
the adequacy of the category of religion in our field, a debate that was opened by
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the 1960s, but which has developed with increased fer-
vor and in quite different directions in the last two decades. The chapter concludes
that “religion-like” clusters of phenomena do appear in contexts other than the
modern West, often as a result of some form of colonialism, but that there is noth-
ing intrinsically and irreducibly “religious” about them: These ways of clustering
phenomena are products of political and social forces whereby certain slices of the
culture in question (arbitrary slices, varying in their content from one instance to
the next) are alienated from political and coercive power. Chapter 7 then applies
this understanding of “religion” as a result of some sort of cultural bifurcation to
the present, showing that, in fact, there can be no “religion” without a “secular,”
that each defines the other, while telling us nothing distinctive about the content of
either. Finally, chapter 8 serves as a kind of case study, an effort to move the discus-
sion beyond the confines of mere theory, and show how the classification of data
Preface xiii
as religious data makes a difference. The example chosen is the field of Christian
origins, and in exploring the limitations (as well as the advantages) of treating
the beginnings of the Jesus movements as necessarily “religious” phenomena,
an alternative approach is suggested, one that does not distinguish between “reli-
gious” and “nonreligious” products of the imagination. Our hope is that other
scholars working in their own specific historical and ethnographic domains would
be willing to entertain redescribing their data in a comparable fashion.
The following volume, then, aims to participate in, and to criticize, the emerg-
ing and increasingly productive discussion in our field about the adequacy of “reli-
gion” as a concept, as an object of study. Our position, obviously enough, is that
(1) the concept of religion is a survival, in the technical, anthropological sense and
has thus outlasted its shelf life; that we would be better served setting aside not
simply the word, but the very idea that it makes good academic sense to clump
together, for description, analysis, or especially explanation, those diverse acts,
institutions, objects, and claims that we normally call “religious.” But in addition,
we are arguing that (2) despite its apparently provocative nature, the academic
scrutiny directed at religion in recent years has not yet sufficiently dispensed with
the concept, either because its reasons for so doing are inadequate or incomplete,
or because problematic associations with the word are addressed while leaving the
core concept intact.
What the following volume does not do, however, is explore the emergence of
precisely the discourse it participates in. That is to say, if, as we argue, religion
and discourses about it are local, partial, and need to be historicized, the same
must be true of the discourse critical of the category “religion.” This is a step that needs
to be taken: What are the conditions of possibility of the kind of critical stance
toward the concept of religion that this book embodies? What is the shape of that
discourse, and who participates in it? (To our knowledge, Schilbrack is among
the few taking this step [2010].) This latter question is especially pressing, as it
seems that the whole critical discussion of the category of religion has assumed
an increasingly rigid and canonical shape. Certain names—Asad, Dubuisson,
Fitzgerald, Masuzawa, McCutcheon, and Jonathan Z. Smith—are raised over and
over, and the debate more and more takes the form of either approving citation or
dismissal of these central arguments. The content of the arguments too seems to
follow familiar parameters consisting of (1) research into scholarly treatments of
religion prior to the twentieth century and (2) arguments about correspondences
between the emergence of “religion” and European contacts with, and coloniza-
tion of, other parts of the world. There is nothing wrong with any of this: The argu-
ments seem to be valid (and many of them are repeated in the chapters following),
and the people normally cited in connection with these arguments are the ones
who have made major contributions to precisely this discussion (and who are cited
most copiously in the chapters following).
xiv Preface
Yet it may be that certain important directions are too readily neglected in this
canonical treatment of the issue. From much of it is missing an appreciation of the
ways in which popular discourses have constructed religion as an object and the
ways in which these constructions have made their way into scholarly discourse.
Also striking is the homogeneity of those involved and most prominent in the
discourse, who are typically (albeit certainly not exclusively) male, “Western” (i.e.,
products of the educational systems of the imperial metropolis), and Anglophone,
often with strong backgrounds in philosophy. Striking too are the kinds of issues
normally elided by the (canonical version of the) discussion. Class and class antag-
onisms seem to play little role in their collective analysis of the construction of
religion as category, and this is in spite of the fact that many of the participants in
the discussion show, to whatever extent, Marxist or at least materialist sensibilities.
Likewise neglected is the role of gender in the construction, past and present, of
religion as a category. Why does this particular theoretical discourse so lopsidedly
neglect class or gender, inter alia? Why does colonialism (and the postcolonial dis-
course associated with it) play such a large, even definitive, role in explaining the
genesis of religion, even while the discourse on the colonial invention of religion
flourishes (mainly) in the Anglophone academy? What historical and discursive
circumstances have made this particular answer to this now-attractive question so
itself attractive? Why have other factors been relatively neglected?
These are questions that we think must be pursued at some point, in the inter-
est of historicizing all of our discourse, but which are not addressed here. Instead,
perhaps regrettably, the following chapters take the current shape of the religion
debate somewhat more for granted, still aiming, however, to shape that debate in
a productive way.
Acknowledgments
the authors wish to thank the following individuals for their feedback and assis-
tance in the development of the ideas and essays included in this book, as well as (in
some cases) for their kind invitations to share these ideas with them, their students,
and their colleagues: Matt Day, Steffen Führding, Aaron Hughes, Greg Johnson,
Darlene Juschka, Janet Klippenstein, Bruce Lincoln, Kenneth MacKendrick, Luther
H. Martin, Dan Mullins, Malory Nye, John Parrish, Andrew Rippin, Kurtis Schaeffer,
Nick Schonhoffer, Jonathan Z. Smith, Stan Stowers, Vaia Touna, Heidi Wendt, and
Donald Wiebe. We thank Madison Langston at the University of Alabama for her
assistance in preparing parts of the manuscript. Of course, these acknowledgments
should in no way suggest that the individuals named are responsible for, or would
agree with, the arguments advanced in this book.
Given the crucial role that he has played in both of our careers—since we all
first met in graduate school during what we like to recall as a brief, golden age
at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Religious Studies (a unit that has since
been reorganized a number of times and renamed)—we wish to single out our
good friend Willi Braun for special thanks. He is our constant discussion partner
when it comes to matters of religion and its study, and his judicious editorial hand
moved across many of the following chapters long before this book was conceived.
Our debts to him are as many as the benefits that we have received from what now
amounts to more than twenty years of friendship.
Apart from citing the publications in which earlier versions of some of the fol-
lowing chapters first appeared in print (see sources), we also wish to acknowledge
the various groups that heard earlier, oral, and sometimes far shorter versions of
the following chapters.
A version of what has become our introduction was written by Russell
McCutcheon for “A Quarter Century of Interrogating ‘Religion’: From Imagining
Religion (1982) to Religion: Beyond a Concept,” a panel at a 2008 meeting of the
North American Association for the Study of Religion, held as part of the annual
meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. More substantive but differing ver-
sions of the introduction have also been presented by McCutcheon: as the keynote
xvi Acknowledgments
address at the Eighth Annual Religion Graduate Student Symposium, Department

of Religious Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee (February 2009); at the
“Interrogating Religion” workshop at the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
(April 2009); at the Institut für Theologie und Religionswissenschaft at Leibniz
University, Hannover, Germany (January 2011); and also as a public lecture at the
State University of New York at Buffalo (September 2011).
A version of chapter 3 was written by William Arnal for a presentation at the
annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Religion,
Orlando, Florida, 1998.
A version of chapter 4 was written by Russell McCutcheon for a presentation
to the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 2002;
it was also presented to the Cultural History of the Study of Religion consultation
at the American Academy of Religion in 2003.
A version of chapter 6 was delivered as a lecture by William Arnal to the
Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, in
2009.
Versions of chapter 7 were presented by Russell McCutcheon: at “Secularism
and Beyond: Comparative Perspectives,” held at the University of Copenhagen,
Denmark (May 2007); as the annual Robert Lester Lecture at the Department of
Religious Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder (September 2007); and pre-
sented as part of the Lansdowne Program at the University of Victoria, British
Columbia, Canada (October 2007).
A version of chapter 8 was presented by William Arnal as an address at the
20th quinquennial meeting of the International Association for the History of
Religions, Toronto, Canada, 2010.
We also wish to thank Vaia Touna, who prepared the index and the Department
of Religious Studies, at the University of Alabama, for supporting her work on
this manuscript.
Sources
the authors would like to acknowledge the following publications in which orig-
inal versions of some of the following chapters first appeared in print:
William E. Arnal, “Definition.” In Guide to the Study of Religion, 21–34. Willi Braun
and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. London: Continuum, 2000. Reprinted with
permission from Continuum International Publishing Group.
Russell T. McCutcheon, “Words, Words, Words.” Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 75/4 (2007): 952–987. Reprinted with permission from Oxford
Journals.
William E. Arnal, “The Segregation of Social Desire: ‘Religion’ and Disney World.”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69/1 (2001): 1–19. Reprinted with
permission from Oxford Journals.
Russell T. McCutcheon, “‘Just Follow the Money’: The Cold War, the Humanistic
Study of Religion, and the Fallacy of Insufficient Cynicism.” Culture & Religion
5/1 (2004): 41–69. Reprinted with permission from Taylor & Francis Ltd (http://
www.tandfonline.com).
Russell T. McCutcheon, “‘They Licked the Platter Clean’: On the Co-Dependency of
the Religious and the Secular.” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 19/3&4
(2007): 173–199. Reprinted with permission from E. J. Brill.
William E. Arnal, “What Kind of Category is ‘Religion’?” In Theory/Religion/
Critique, Richard King, ed., forthcoming. Reprinted with permission from
Columbia University Press.
Russell T. McCutcheon, “Everything Old Is New Again.” In Failure and Nerve in the
Academic Study of Religion: Essays in Honor of Donald Wiebe. William E. Arnal,
Willi Braun, and Russell T. McCutcheon, eds. London: Equinox Publishers, 2012.
Reprinted with permission from Equinox Publishers.
The Sacred Is the Profane
Introduction: On the Persistence of
Imagining Religion
as part of his opening remarks during the first U.S. presidential debate of 2008
(held on September 26), the moderator and well-known public television news
anchor Jim Lehrer set the evening’s parameters: “Tonight’s [debate] will primarily
be about foreign policy and national security, which, by definition, includes the
global financial crisis.” Now, for anyone who recalls the U.S. news during the
last weeks of September of that year, it was obvious what he was talking about.
At the time of the debate, a proposal to shift $700 billion tax dollars was being
considered by the U.S. Congress, transferring what the press was calling “toxic
debt” from private banks to the federal government. The two parties’ presidential
candidates had, earlier that very day, flown to Washington, D.C., at then-President
George W. Bush’s invitation to participate in meetings intended to create a con-
sensus between the two political parties concerning how to address what pretty
much everyone was by then calling a crisis (one that now, in hindsight, we know
to have grown far worse). The meetings, however, failed and so, at the time of that
evening’s debate, the government had arrived at no rescue plan.
Although the first debate between John McCain and Barack Obama was to be
devoted to foreign policy and national security—undoubtedly focusing on topics
external to the nation, such as geopolitical and military matters—dire economic
events internal to the United States, such as the housing market’s bursting bubble,
could not be ignored, suggesting that the common distinction between inside and
outside—even the distinction between political and economic—was no longer as
useful as the Commission on Presidential Debates had previously thought when
setting that evening’s agenda. In fact, the moderator’s choice of opening words—
calling what was then simply the United States’ problem instead a “global finan-
cial crisis”—made evident that, at least when it comes to banking, the day had long
past when such classifications as “domestic” and “foreign” could sensibly be used
as if they applied to actual, distinguishable things.
Perhaps it was because Lehrer recognized that many of his viewers’ com-
monsense understanding of the world (what we might term their nationalist
folk classification system) normally distinguished between such things as locals
and foreigners, domestic and international, that he thought it wise to authorize
2 t he sac r ed is t he p rofa ne
his linkage of these otherwise separable domains with an authoritative stamp—

as in when, still speaking during his preface to the debate, he added, “General
Eisenhower said in his 1952 presidential campaign, quote, ‘We must achieve both
security and solvency. In fact, the foundation of military strength is economic
strength,’ end quote.”1 Despite the labors of scholars theorizing this process that
we now know as globalization, it seems that the debate organizers believed that
at least some viewers of that telecast needed to be reminded, by General (and
then soon-to-be President) Eisenhower’s curiously Marxist sense of the economic
base, that the day when the local and the global could be usefully distinguished
had long passed. And, if it was not clear to them by the time of that first debate,
then in the weeks and months that followed, it became painfully obvious that the
common-folk distinction between us and them, between politics and economics,
does not necessarily reflect how such things as banks and corporations do busi-
ness in this modern world of ours.
What we find interesting about that debate’s opening attention to matters of
classification—and the reason why we begin this book by making reference to
it—is that it makes apparent that there are times when the analytic utility of widely
used folk taxonomies (i.e., conceptual systems that members of social groups use
to delimit and thereby manage their environment and, in so doing, determine
their place within it) can be so diminished as to make their continued use part of
the problem to be analyzed rather than being among the tools needed to begin an
examination of other things. Or, phrased differently, it nicely demonstrates that
there are occasions when a scholar would be foolish to adopt a popular folk con-
cept as an analytic one—no matter how widespread its use among her readership
or the population under study. For instance, although there are probably still times
when one can profitably distinguish between such seemingly different things as,
say, military, political, and economic issues, or when the usually taken-for-granted
boundaries between nation-states enable one to distinguish, say, an American
domestic issue from its international counterparts in, say, France or Germany, the
fact of the United States waging two wars that, at the time of that 2008 debate,
were estimated to cost $12 billion per month2 while representatives in Congress
debated injecting close to a trillion dollars into the U.S. investment and insurance
system3 (a number that, not too long after, was dwarfed by Congress’s successive
bailout packages—or, to press home the point of this book, should we say “stimu-
lus packages”?) and doing all of this in the final weeks of a presidential election,
well, this situation made painfully apparent to the debate’s organizers that it was
no longer in anyone’s interest to continue to distinguish between those suppos-
edly separable domains known as the domestic and the foreign. For although the
nationalist rhetoric of “buy American” may still remain useful when trying to
sell General Motor’s products over Honda’s—despite the fact that the so-called
“Japanese” car might have been built in Alabama and the shareholders of the
so-called “American” car company might live in Japan—the debate’s organizers

seem to have wisely decided that the folksy distinction between local and foreign
probably would be of little use to the person who, as the soon-to-be-elected presi-
dent, would have to tackle the challenge of addressing the financial meltdown.
We open this introduction—a particularly meaty introduction, given that the
chapters to follow argue what, for some readers, may amount to be a counterin-
tuitive thesis—by making reference to Jim Lehrer’s comments in order to cre-
ate an analogical space from which we can think about the implications of the
categories and the distinctions that we, as scholars of religion, use when going
about our work. For we carry out our studies, and define them as an area or a
discipline, by using as our primary categorical tool one that, despite its admittedly
widespread use around the world today, is nonetheless a geographically and his-
torically specific folk category that members of certain groups have long used to
divide up and map their social worlds to move around within them and form rela-
tionships with others who are judged as either like or not like them—whether they
be 19th-century Europeans keen to distinguish their “religion” from the so-called
primitive’s “superstition” or those students who, whether they know it or not,
seem to be channeling William James when they inform us that they are “spiri-
tual” and not “religious.” By adopting such groups’ usefully plastic folk term as our
own—and, in adopting it, elevating it to the level of an analytic category—scholars
have indeed been able to select from the busy social world such things as religious
symbols, beliefs, behaviors, objects, and institutions; they have found commonali-
ties between instances of each that are separated from one another in time and
space, and then, by means of creative juxtapositions (i.e., doing what we call com-
parative religion), they have established the existence of a sufficient number of
similarities to prompt scholars to draw confident conclusions about such things as
faith, experience, meaning, and even human nature itself—conclusions that, we
are commonly told, apply to our entire species, past, present, and future (hence
the once-popular term homo religiosus). However, much like that televised debate’s
viewers being asked to reconsider their assumptions concerning the domestic and
the foreign, the following chapters invite readers to set aside the supposed gains in
knowledge made by using the category “religion” as a cross-cultural, trans-human
universal of deep and abiding personal significance and, for a moment, to have
them reconsider the now widely shared, seemingly commonsense presumption
that there is such a thing in the world called religion, that it takes different forms
in different regions and eras, that it is a feature of all human beings, and that it is
inherently or properly distinguishable from that nonreligious thing that goes by
the name of politics, the secular, the profane, or, simply put, the mundane.
We extend this invitation because, as historically minded scholars—that is,
scholars who conceive our object of study, the world of human doings, as a his-
torical (and by this we mean contingent) affair—it should, but does not always,
go without saying that we must not fail to understand that the tools we use to
divide up and organize that world—such categories as “the past,” “the nation,”
“tradition,” “meaning,” “myth,” “ritual,” and, of course, “religion”—are our tools
(i.e., human beings made them and human beings use them), used to carry out
our work and accomplish our goals. In as much as we scholars are part of this
world of human doings, then the products of our labors are not neutral descrip-
tors of stable, self-evident realities, but instead are, like ourselves, the results of
human ingenuity and interests, making them tools that are used by social actors
in specific situations for strategic purposes—much like the rhetorically loaded
“buy American” campaign, whether used to sell cars or to sell the idea of Federal
bailout packages to American taxpayers. But should the interests and situations
of the social actors who use the categories change, then, once again, as histori-
cally minded scholars, we should find it sensible that our tools—regardless of
who once used them and for what reasons—will need to be retooled, and perhaps
even discarded entirely. Here’s a case in point: Despite its once prominent role
as a 19th-century science, we have not met a phrenologist recently and assume
that anyone linking bumps on heads to personality traits will have a considerably
difficult time obtaining research funding or publishing their results. As for those
sculptures of skulls with various cognitive functions and emotions mapped onto
them—they’re now curiously ironic items decorating offices and no longer the
diagnostic tools they once might have been. So, regardless of how others may see
the world, how they might divide it up, and what names they might give to the
parts that result from such divisions, the sort of scholars that we have in mind
are, we argue, different from the social actors whom they study inasmuch as they
do their work presuming that there is no god’s-eye vantage point and therefore no
neutral or universal language, which we chose to read as meaning that there can
be no significance without prior systems of signification and, moreover, that these
systems do not grow spontaneously overnight, like mushrooms. We are thus the
makers of our own meanings.
If we make the shift to the sort of scholars that we have in mind, a shift that
entails being responsible for the tools that we develop and use, then a few things
could result for our primary taxonomic device (i.e., the category “religion”). First,
we might become curious as to why scholars in the Euro-North American tradi-
tion have adopted and used this local folk concept as if it were a trans-human yet
deeply personal trait (think here of its usual synonyms: belief, faith, experience,
feeling, sentiment, etc.). Certainly, it’s not the only local term that falls into this
family of local fabricated-yet-universalized categories—consider such other con-
cepts as “culture,” “text,” “gender,” “psyche,” or “race,” to name but a few—but,
for reasons deserving of study, proponents of the category “religion” seem to be
putting up a better defense of its so-called commonsense utility and universal
applicability to name a permanent acquisition of the human spirit than even those
old-guard literary critics who fought so valiantly to safeguard the value of a small
number of texts that they called “literature.”
Second, keeping in mind those who labor so hard to find religion in the human
heart, we may become interested in the work that the concept (and the practices
and institutions that support it) accomplishes, either for our contemporaries
(whether for our scholarly peers or, say, for people in Burma, protesting in the fall
of 2007 for their “religious freedom”) or for those from whom we have inherited
the term—such as those early-modern Europeans who, sometime around the 17th
and 18th centuries, were involved in a widespread change of meaning, such that
words that had once been lodged in social and institutional settings came to sig-
nify politically disengaged, internal, emotive states and identities. As Jonathan Z.
Smith, in his chapter in Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies, has
phrased it, “[t]erms such as ‘reverence,’ ‘service,’ ‘adore,’ and ‘worship’ . . . have [by
the mid-18th century] been all but evacuated of [earlier] ritual connotation, and
seem more to denote a state of mind” (271). Smith sees this “shift to belief,” as
he calls it, captured nicely in the move from a classical sense of pietas, conceived
in the Graeco-Roman world as a social judgment based on one’s appropriate or
inappropriate behavior toward those of differing status, to our modern sense
of piety, conceived as a personal sentiment or private disposition. Our category
“religion”—which, just a few centuries ago, was a term used to name one’s social
identity, like a monk being called “a religious” as in a member of a order—is part
of this “shift to belief” inasmuch as we now understand it as a uniquely personal
faith or feeling that is somehow projected outwardly (i.e., not insignificantly, one
expresses one’s faith)—a shift that takes what was once understood as social, insti-
tutional, and thus political (i.e., yet another element of the mundane world) as if it
were a unique product of personal feelings and individual choices.
A third result of making the shift to a more rigorously historical approach is
that we may become interested in why we, as scholars, continue to use this cat-
egorical tool. In other words, we might ask what is gained by scholars assuming
that human belief, behavior, and institutions contain a domain that is somehow
distinct from all others—its specifically religious meaning or nature? And, lest
you think that we are reverting to an old thesis and criticizing essentialists or
theologians in our field—those who artfully used this rhetoric to establish the
unique institutional niche that we now occupy and in which we do our work—
keep in mind that so-called reductionists, naturalists, and social scientists equally
presume religion’s trans-human uniqueness, inasmuch as they are busy creating
theories to explain it, theories distinct from those that account for other aspects of
human behavior.
Fourth and finally, more historically minded scholars who recognize their tools
as human creations that have a shelf life and both conceptual and practical con-
sequences might conclude that, because elevating this curious folk term to the
status of cross-cultural universal tells us nothing new or interesting about the

world—or at least tells us nothing that the people already using the term haven’t
already told us when we interviewed them, watched them, or read their books—
we should stop using the category “religion” as a technical, explanatory term (i.e.,
“They do this or that because they are religious”). Although our ethnographies of
social groups whose members use the term will, of course, have to contain the
word as part of our record/mapping of their local system of knowledge (i.e., as
part of our effort to document how the term is connected to other elements of
their cognitive and social systems and what its use, in concert with a host of other
terms and actions, accomplishes for them), scholarly explanations, even inter-
pretations, of those same systems will drop the term altogether when they move
beyond mere description, for scholars will no longer assume that their research
subjects’ self-reports are somehow in lockstep with the social facts on the ground.
For example, despite their onetime prominence in earlier scholarly theories, we
no longer employ the Polynesian-derived terms “taboo” or “mana” in our studies,
as if they named actual things or actual development stages, rather than simply
being part of one people’s local socio-semantic lexicon; so why do we continue to
afford the category “religion”—no less a member of a local lexicon—the status
that we do?
Without getting overly existential, what the following chapters invite readers
to consider is, quite simply and bluntly put, their own mortality. Or, phrased with
a little more delicacy, we are asking readers to take seriously their own historicity
and situatedness—that we, like those who came before us and, hazarding a guess,
those who will likely follow us, are thinking and acting within bodies as well as
cognitive and social systems that have a past and, like all other features of the
historical world, an uncertain future. Taking that seriously—to borrow a favored
term from those who once criticized scholars for daring to think that religion
could be studied as something other than religion—means learning how to treat
the categories in our conceptual toolbox a little less seriously. For we tend to think
that scholars a hundred years ago took a little too seriously their social evolution-
ary theories and the sociopolitical interests that drove them, all of which were
condensed into one of their primary tools, the notion of the primitive. Scholars,
as well as the general public at that time, were quite certain that they knew where
the primitives lived, how to get there to see them, how to learn more about them,
what it was about them that made them members of “the lower races” or represen-
tatives of “the childhood of the species,” and how they were (or better, were not)
related to us, here in what was commonly referred to as our higher place in the
civilized world. Even the work of such an influential and seemingly progressive
anthropologist as Bronislaw Malinowski, whose early-20th-century emphasis on
cultural immersion and careful ethnography helped to establish a model that con-
tinues to characterize the work of our colleagues in anthropology, was implicated
in a view of the world that many of his readers today find deeply troublesome—a
view easily found in the manner in which he, like his predecessors, divided up
the world between tribal natives, representing an earlier stage in our collective
social evolution, and ourselves, civilized moderns. What is our point? If the once
pervasive scholarly, technical designation of “the primitive,” as well as much of
the scholarship carried out under its banner, has left the academic stage—despite
having had a good run of several centuries, during which time it went from a pejo-
rative term of savagery to a word that carried with it, as recently as Mircea Eliade’s
work just a generation or two ago, a Romantic nostalgia for a lost innocence—then
perhaps we should consider a little more carefully the implications of the terms
that we use to carry out our work today. After all, we will one day be a hundred
years in someone else’s academic past.
Fortunately, an increasing number of scholars are now doing just that—tak-
ing a new look at a persistent, old term. For example, in October of 2008, one
of us participated in a conference in Germany devoted to examining what the
organizers termed “Dynamics in the History of Religions.”4 Unlike many of our
predecessors, the conference conceptualized religions not as static things but as
ever-changing objects in motion—a theoretical shift signaled by the replacement
of reified, singular nouns with their plural forms and an emphasis on studying
people’s observable practices rather than on such intellectual abstractions as their
beliefs. This move from the one to the many with the emphasis on difference
over similarity is by now quite common in our field. Moreover, this widespread
turn from practicing our field as if it was a branch of the history of ideas toward
studying what is now known as “religion on the ground” or “material religion”—a
move that estranges former close relationships with our cousins in philosophy
and, instead, forges affinities with our new friends, the social anthropologists and
culture studies—suggests that a generation’s worth of critiques of essentialism
have had their desired effect and that we will no more see scholars of religion
assuming that their object of study is unique, timeless, and self-evidently interest-
ing. And so, to the critics in the field, we might now offer a tip of the hat, as the
U.S. political satirist Stephen Colbert might say, hang a mission-accomplished
banner, as the Bush administration once did, and just get on with the business of
studying religions—significantly, in the plural, and on the move—content that a
little theory has offered a necessary corrective.
Or so one might think. . . . But after looking a little more closely at the work of
some of those who are now rethinking their use of the category “religion,” it has
become clear to us that troublesome assumptions persist despite the so-called
advances.
This was evident in the work of two noted North American sociologists whose
papers closed that conference in Germany. Like a number of others in our field
today who focus on the category “religion,” both were interested in the study of
secularism, though, of course, this is hardly the now-discredited secularization

thesis (i.e., that religion was increasingly becoming irrelevant in the modern,
secular world)—a onetime-popular position that has been much scoffed at since
those who championed it failed to either anticipate or account for such things as,
say, the Iranian revolution of 1979. Instead of predicting the eventual decline of
religion, the closing speakers both described the manner in which such notions
as church and state, or religion and politics, are binary pairs that provide a frame-
work in which modern social actors establish and negotiate their worlds. Over the
past decade, this sort of focus on the sacred/secular and religion/politics pairings
has become an increasingly popular research topic, such that today it constitutes
the driving force behind much new work being done across several fields: For
example, discussing this issue is the rationale behind the Social Science Research
Council’s recently instituted blog “The Immanent Frame,” subtitled “Secularism,
Religion, and the Public Square.” It was also the topic explored at a March 2009
conference at the New School in New York entitled “The Religious-Secular Divide:
The U.S. Case.” Applicants applying for the 2010–2011 academic year at Princeton’s
prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies were asked to tailor their proposals
to address, as the flyer put it, “the universalist claims of liberalism,” specifically
as they relate to the presumably “sharp oppositions between the secular and the
religious [and] modernity and traditionalism.” It is one of the recurring themes
of Hent de Vries’s 1,000-page edited volume, Religion: Beyond a Concept (2008).
Because we find this topic at the heart of so much work on the history of the cat-
egory “religion,” we are persuaded that studies of the sacred/secular pairing now
constitute one of our field’s sharpest cutting edges.
Thinking back to the two final papers delivered at that conference in Germany,
we have no disagreements with their authors’ positions on the nature of the
sacred/secular pairing. Or, more correctly, we should say that we had no disagree-
ments with these two papers until each presenter, in our opinion, waffled on their
commitment to thinking seriously—thinking historically in a rigorous manner—
about how binaries function, because each of their analyses concluded that notions
of religion and the secular were early modern Christian theological concepts, as
if those things that we today commonly identify as religious—such things as, say,
Christian theology—somehow preceded, and thus caused to develop, the subse-
quent ability to name those things that were not religious.
Now, we fully understand why people make the move of imagining religion—or
perhaps we should say not religion but, instead, religiosity, a topic to which we will
return—to pre-exist the categorical distinction between religion and not-religion,
for it enables them to retain, in a typically idealist fashion, the deeply felt baby
(variously called experience, faith, spirituality, meaning, etc.) while throwing
out the linguistic bathwater—bathwater that some of us happen to know by the
Latin-based name of “religion,” a name that we (or so the current trendy critique
goes) ethnocentrically export when naming the babies in other people’s hearts,
on distant shores. Understandably, then, imagining religion to pre-exist the cat-
egory “religion” has become a common move among a certain group of schol-
ars. Look through the recent criticisms of some prominent U.S. Indologists—for
example, the vocal and sometimes impassioned critiques of the works of such
writers as Wendy Doniger, James Laine, Paul Courtright, and Jeff Kripal. (Or con-
sider how yoga, and who owns it and who is appropriating it for what is portrayed
as non-authentic purposes, is now at the center of a heated international debate.)
Their critics—many of whom, curiously perhaps, are diaspora professionals living
and working outside India—are rather upset with how so-called Western schol-
ars use imported theories to study what the critics known as their own religion.
For example, as phrased by S. N. Balangangadhara (himself a faculty member in
Belgium), in the foreword to a 2007 collection of essays published in India and
written by such critics, entitled Invading the Sacred, many Indian intellectuals
realize that Western explanations of their religions and culture trivialize

their lived experiences; by distorting, such explanations transform these,
and this denies Indians access to their own experiences. It can thus be said
to rob them of their inner lives. (vii)
The corrective for such robbery is simple enough: Indian scholars must take their
religion, their very selves, back from the neocolonialists. Curiously, however, these
critics do not adopt the position that European-derived designators—such as
Balangangadhara’s terms “culture,” “religion,” and “experience”—also have no ana-
lytic utility when it comes to examining the Indian world; instead, they complain that
U.S. and European scholars misrepresent what the critics somehow accurately know
to be their own personal religion, their own actual culture, and their own authentic
experience—all terms that, despite their foreign pedigree, are somehow known to be
in one-to-one step with the so-called “local” people’s inner lives.
What must not go unnoticed in all this is that, despite what some liberal-minded
observers might read as a laudable, critical subaltern attitude toward Western
imperialism, such critics are surprisingly conservative in their responses, for they
seem to have little choice but to play by an alien, imported set of rules—rules
that presume this thing that some of us happen to call religion to be a univer-
sal possession of all humankind (whether social and historical actors elsewhere,
who obviously lack the term, know it or not). Rather than changing this scholarly
game altogether—and, for instance, establishing in India the cross-cultural, aca-
demic study of caste or, say, Dharmawissenschaft, each conceived as the carefully
nuanced, historical and theoretical study of a local concept elevated to the status
of universal possession of humankind (whether social and historical actors, such
as ourselves, who obviously lack the terms, know it or not)—they instead try to
beat us at our own hegemonic game (which is a quick but no less useful summa-
tion of the postcolonial situation, in which books critical of, say, British conquest
are nonetheless written in English and published and distributed worldwide by,
for example, Oxford University Press). The irony, then, is that even if Western
Indologists lose the battle over how best to study this thing we all now know to be
“the religion of Hinduism”—and looking at the fate of the American Academy of
Religion’s Religion in South Asia Group, over the past decade or so, would be a
wonderful test case for the thesis we are outlining here—they nonetheless win the
imperialist war, for now their so-called “Others” are Westerners too, for they can
only think themselves into agency by defending, sometimes violently, not just the
proper way to study “their religion,” but the proper way to be a “Hindu”—whether
in Mumbai or Toronto. Apparently, in this modern world of ours, the West-East
distinction is just as anachronistic, but nonetheless as rhetorically useful, as the
“buy American” campaign.
Presuming religion to pre-exist the word “religion”—which amounts to see-
ing the concept or its meaning somehow to predate and thus float free of the
word—thus presents us with a number of problems that deserve more attention
than they have received over the last quarter decade, despite all the ink that is now
flowing in studying the invention of the secular. For example, reconsider the claim
made at the German conference that the binary pair of church and state, or that
the very designation “religion” itself, was invented by Christian theologians; this
now-common claim prompts us to ask to what the supposedly pre-religion signi-
fiers “theology” and “Christian” refer, and how it is that we know that certain parts
of the world of discourse that bear these names are somehow united with a shared
identity (an identity that allows us so casually to connect the one adjective to the
other noun). Without contemporary scholars pitching the modern concepts of reli-
gion and not-religion backward in time, we are not sure why talk about such a thing
as medieval Christian theology ought to take place in our particular field, let alone
why anyone even ought to be talking about it (i.e., presuming it to be a self-evident
fact that requires study); in fact, without our modern concept “religion,” we’re not
sure how that group of rhetoricians (the larger category into which they presuma-
bly fall) whom we commonly know as theologians stands out as any different from
a host of other propagandists injecting themselves into public debates by means
of their writings and speeches. Without the conceptual distinction of religion and
not-religion up and running, what is this thing “Christian,” and what are we to
make of the European literary genre known as “theology”? Simply put, without
the concept “religion,” why do such things in the world as Christians and theology
stand out as noticeable and worth talking about?
People long before us, of course, used the designations “theology” and
“Christian,” but—and this is the point that sloppy historians easily overlook in
their rush to normalize and universalize but one local taxonomy by retrojecting it
throughout human history—they hardly used them as we do today. Just as a scholar

of American history had better be careful not to assume that a late-17th-century
writer was signifying the same thing by means of the signifiers “America” or
“United States” as a modern writer who includes in her nationalist imaginaire
taken-for-granted notions of global dominance or something as simple as pre-
sumptions about making it in the Big Apple, the glamour of Tinsel Town, or the
excitement of the western frontier—let alone adopt any of her research subjects’
folk claims about this or that constituting “the American experience,” as if such
claims were referring to an actual thing that somehow developed over time—
so too we ought to be a little more careful in our adoption of such folk terms
as “theology” and “Christian.” For instance, among the earliest known uses of
“Christian” and “Christianity” are those in the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, in the
second century c.e. In these uses, however, he is not opposing these labels to any-
thing like secularity (which would be anachronistic); rather, such terms function
as identity labels for group and institutional affiliations (just as you would predict
if you understood Ignatius to be writing long before what J. Z. Smith termed the
“shift to belief”). Thus, to be a “Christian” in this historical period, one need not
have a concept of “religion”—or, we would add, any of its modern, idealist syn-
onyms: spirituality, faith, belief, or lived experience. All one needs are other social
identities that are understood by Ignatius as not-Christian. To rephrase it: There’s
nothing religious (as we today use this term) about being Christian, or even a the-
ologian, in prior historical eras. It is therefore not so much that Christian theolo-
gians invented the category “religion” as that it, used in a specifically modern way,
reinvented prior social actors as spiritually motivated Christian theologians.
Thus, without the category “religion,” and its relations to a series of other cat-
egories and discursive domains with which we moderns think and act our par-
ticular world into meaningfulness, we are sure that we can continue to talk about
theology and Christianity, but we have no idea yet what we’ll mean by such talk—
unless all we do is paraphrase how social actors in earlier eras, eager to distinguish
one group from another, one set of advantages from other sets of disadvantages,
used the terms. So, much like the role played by creative corporate accounting in
our present economic situation, supposed gains in studying the category “reli-
gion” hide undisclosed losses.
As a case in point, reconsider the now widely shared preference for plurals
over singulars. The trouble here is that, in dropping the singular noun “reli-
gion” or “Judaism” and replacing it with its plural, the gain in arriving at a more
nuanced approach to cross-cultural and historical difference is overshadowed by
leaving unexamined just what it is about the plural species—all those religions or
Judaisms—that makes them all members of a singular genus. In the proliferation
of Buddhisms, Christianities, or Hinduisms, the erstwhile singular family identity
in each case is just deferred to the level of genus; identity of some sort remains
intact, unspoken, and thus untheorized. We think here of Talal Asad’s much cited
(and, for many on the left, now taken as gospel) critique of Clifford Geertz’s defi-
nition of religion as a cultural system (discussed especially in chapter 1). If we
grant to Asad that, as he phrases it in the introduction to Genealogies of Religion,
“[t]here is no single, privileged narrative of the modern world” (1993: 9–10), then
we will not only critique the export and universalizing of the concept “religion,”
as he does so well, but we will also scrutinize how it is that, when scholars follow
Asad’s advice and do away with the universal, reified concept of, say, “Islam,” and
instead study the lived experiences of Muslims “on the ground,” such scholars
nonetheless somehow still know who to study and who not to study (that is, who is
and who is not a Muslim). How they do this without reference to a reified concept
baffles us. (Well, not really. An untheorized, folk definition of who is and who is
not a Muslim is uncritically adopted by such scholars, allowing them to know who
is properly named “Muslim” and who, for example, is inauthentically Muslim.)
Sadly, our historicization and, no doubt, well-intentioned emphasis on difference
often turn out to be rather partial, for even when we identify problems with our
categories and then let some of them go, there somehow still remains a neces-
sary, ahistorical identity lurking below the multiple surfaces, something that, to
combine two old phrases, somehow simply “presents itself” to “those who have
ears to hear.”
Our difficulty with the field’s pluralization is that we are unsure how one reg-
ulates this endlessly plural economy because, according to this line of thought,
would there not be as many Islams as there are self-declared Muslims? (And
thus we find ourselves back at Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s troublesome emphasis
on studying the faith in men’s [sic] hearts; see chapter 6.) Or are there certain
differences in the many that we, as scholars, can obviously overlook in order to
produce such taken-for-granted generalizations as, for example, “Catholic” and
“Protestant”? To press further, in doing so, do we overlook the differences and
accentuate the similarities that some group members themselves overlook or focus
upon in their effort to manage conflict and form group identities—after all, is not
the distinction between Catholic and Protestant merely an old, polemic insider
one of early-modern sociopolitical import? If so, why do we as scholars continue
to use it, as if it names two obviously different things in the world, rather than see-
ing this way of naming and dividing people as someone else’s social strategy that
itself deserves study rather than uncritical reproduction? Are we not as scholars
free to move beyond participants’ use of folk taxonomies and self-definitions? For,
as suggested earlier, uncritically reproducing—instead of studying—local clas-
sification systems will lead us to normalizing and thus legitimizing participant
distinctions and the interests that drive (or once drove) them, such as when we
adopt a distinction specific to a group’s own members and end up talking about,
say, Shi’ites as being obviously different from Sunnis. Sadly, in most cases, we fail
to ask, different according to whose criteria and for what purposes?—a question that,
once posed, would allow us to examine, rather than uncritically reproduce, the
mechanisms by which identities are created and contested.
It is just this sort of shallow historicization that occurs when historians of
the secular naturalize one part of what is supposedly a binary—as if prior to the
invention of cooking, we all somehow just knew that our food was raw. When it
comes to recent studies of religion and not- religion, what we therefore often find
is simply a repackaged version of the old, old story of how the primitive world
was once homogenously religious and, with the advent of modernity, was sadly
disenchanted—we could go so far as calling this story’s rebirth the new seculariza-
tion thesis. It is a thesis in evidence, for example, when scholars critique the noun
“religion” while still relying on the adjective “religious” or the supposedly internal
quality known as religiosity. For instance, consider Muhammad Zaman’s book,
The Ulama in Contemporary Islam (2002), in which the British colonial use of the
category “religion” is, in our opinion, rightly named a sociopolitical management
technique. Yet having freed himself from the category “religion,” the author is still
able to speak of people’s “faith” as being different from their political orientation,
and he repeatedly uses the adjective “religious” to distinguish this from that legal
system or this from that text. Somewhat reminiscent of a mythical phoenix, the
adjective miraculously arises from the ashes of the noun’s critique. Yet if we agree
with Zaman when he argues that “British colonial officials routinely invoked what
to them were familiar and often self-evident concepts and categories” to manage
colonial populations (62)—among which was “religion”—then why not entertain
that his suitably modernist distinction between pristine faith on the inside and
political tradition on the outside could be up to something as well, rather than a
neutral description of pre-existing realities in the world?
Although we think that the sleight of hand that produces this miracle is what
we ought to be studying, looking over the work that has appeared over the past
decade or so, our view is not shared by many of those who now study the category
“religion.” This leads us to conclude that, of the two best-known Smiths in our
modern field, each of whom represents contending sides on some of the issues
that we have quickly surveyed in this introduction, but which receive much greater
attention in the chapters that follow, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s work is, lamentably,
from our point of view, far more representative of the modern field than Jonathan
Z. Smith’s. Our hunch is that this is because of the strategic interests that the
former’s emphasis on the lone individual’s interior faith (as the precursor to his
or her publicly observable actions) helps social actors (who use this distinction)
to accomplish—interests doggedly undermined by the carefully composed com-
parative and historical studies of the latter Smith. By helping us to distinguish
between the pristine, individual person on the one hand, and his or her subse-
quent social situation on the other, the scholarly tradition represented by Wilfred
Cantwell allows us never to examine the institutional practices that led to just this
or that view of “the individual”—practices that are no more pristine or personal
than is our collective mastery of the linguistic practices that enable us to partici-
pate in groups, while nonetheless thinking that we each have private meanings
spontaneously floating in our heads, meanings that are manifested—a word that
we purposefully use—and thereby conveyed across the ether by our words.
To illustrate this point, allow us to return to that analogical space from where
it is sometimes easier to think through the problems of our field and consider a
scene from the popular 2006 movie, The Devil Wears Prada, to suggest how easily
we—like the film’s naïve young protagonist (played by Anne Hathaway)—can lull
ourselves into thinking that we somehow float free of the very social situations and
institutions that provided us with the conditions to think ourselves into action in
the first place. After failing to notice the difference between two seemingly similar
belts being discussed by the other employees of the fashion magazine where she
has just begun to work, and then after adopting a somewhat dismissive tone to
defend herself (“You know, I’m still learning about all this stuff and, uh . . .”), she
finds herself on the receiving end of the following speech from her uncompromis-
ing boss and editor of the magazine, the eponymous “devil,” Miranda Priestly:
This . . . “stuff”? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you.
You go to your closet and you select . . ., I don’t know . . ., that lumpy blue
sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take
yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what
you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s
not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact
that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And
then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent . . ., wasn’t it, who showed cerulean
military jackets? . . . And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collec-
tions of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through
the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual
Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However,
that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of
comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from
the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was
selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.
Although we hopefully have adopted a tone somewhat different from Miranda

Priestly as played by Meryl Streep, what we are arguing is not that far removed
from her speech: That, despite its seemingly progressive tone, a highly effective
interiorization, and thus a dehistoricization and a depoliticization of the social, are
taking place in much recent work on the category “religion.” Tied as it is to notions
of interiority, autonomy, privacy, individual choice, authenticity, lived experience,

and thus enduring personal identity, the folk and scholarly category “religion” can
be understood as part of a wider discourse on the modern, universal subject—that
which today finds its political home in the notion of citizenship, its economic home
in the notion of consumerism, and its kinship home in the notion of race—to name
but three sites where a typically modern individual is continually recreated—the
type of subject especially useful to the needs of the various structures that provide
the settings in which we live our lives. If so, then the category “religion” doggedly
persists in both popular and scholarly imaginations inasmuch as we ourselves
are moderns who take for granted that we are discrete, uniform, rationally decid-
ing selves, who, much as Jean Jacques Rousseau famously argued in The Social
Contract (1762), intentionally form corporate groups for our personal convenience
and individual gain. Like many other devices of our modern age, the category “reli-
gion” enables us to take a social invention—the modern self—as if it were a spon-
taneous gift from the eternal past. An uninvited imperial export soon becomes an
indigenous quality of our deepest and truest nature—all of which enables groups
to individualize and thereby authorize the world-as-they-happen-to-arrange-it as a
world-that-could-not-be-otherwise—whether that world is politically liberal or con-
servative, socially and economically dominant or marginal.
We therefore advise reconsidering our critiques of the category “religion” and
much of our current work on the secular, seeing the persistent habit of assuming
people to have rich, active, inner religious or so-called spiritual lives as but one
more folk site where a specific form of what Michel Foucault aptly termed govern-
mentalité has been bureaucratized and globalized, a process that has legitimized
certain types of subjects and specific types of social relations. As we see it, the
mission of scholarship is not to reproduce this process but to historicize it—for
it is a process that slips sui generis religion in behind the mask of its adjective.
Yet despite the recent focus on the secular, this scholarly mission has hardly been
accomplished, which suggests to us why carefully considering Jonathan Z. Smith’s
approach to our habit of imagining religion remains important to the field.
And so we close this introduction by recalling how Jim Lehrer opened that
presidential debate a few years ago—his deft way of drawing critical attention to
a familiar set of assumptions that may have outlasted their utility. But given how
entrenched the assumptions that we have addressed have become in our modern
world, how high the stakes are in rethinking and, perhaps, moving past them, we
feel that we can only now make full use of his opening remarks here in our closing
lines. For only now might some readers understand why, despite its authors being
classed as scholars of religion, this introduction (and by extension, the rest of this
book) has not been about religion at all, and why it has so freely moved across
what some may consider to be (too) broadly different human domains. Assuming
that naming something as religion is a social act like any other, this book is about
some of the implications for how some human beings divide up, and arrange,
and thereby come to know their worlds—a topic that, by definition, includes not
only those who name some institutions as religions and some claims as religious,
but that also extends far beyond them as well. We hope that it is therefore evident
why, despite the religion/not-religion distinction gaining strength among local,
folk communities worldwide—groups who use it to do specific sorts of work for
themselves—we contend that, much like the distinction between the domestic
and the foreign, it has long outlived its scholarly utility, making the category “reli-
gion” an example of what our 19th-century predecessors might have once called
a curious survival. And, like the idea of the primitive, perhaps it might be time to
turn our attention to studying why it has survived so well—examining its histori-
cal resiliency, political elasticity, and geographic mobility—rather than continue
to perpetuate this discourse in our studies of religion—whether in the singular or
plural, whether static or on the move.
So, with all this in mind, we invite readers to take another look at this book’s cover
photo—those children praying in school (possibly a public school?). We’re hoping
that readers can be interested in both their own ability to “see” religion in this
photo (or, to rephrase, their inability not to see it) as well as their own reaction to
what they “see”—whether that reaction amounts to being perturbed by the pres-
ence of prayer in the schools or a nostalgic lament for its absence. For the implica-
tions of understanding the world in just this way is what the following chapters
are about.
1
On the Definition of Religion
Defining “Definition”
surprisingly enough, until fairly recently the definition of religion has not been
a consistent major concern for either students of specific religious traditions or
theorists of religion. We would expect, at least under ideal circumstances, that any
academic inquiry would begin with a careful circumscription of its subject matter
and at least a passing attention to the question of why that subject matter is wor-
thy of study in the first place. In other areas of study, these sorts of issues tend to
be neglected only when the discipline is so firmly entrenched, institutionally and
ideologically, that it does not even occur to anyone to ask the question of definition
in the first place, as may sometimes be the case with classics or English or his-
tory, for example, or, for that matter, theology. The study of religion unmotivated
by tradition-specific commitments, by contrast, is a relatively new addition to the
academic repertoire and by no means has a secure position within the secular
university curriculum (Juschka 1997: 8–10), where it continues to be confused
with theology.
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that, although the academic study of reli-
gion may be a recent enterprise, the popular use of the term “religion” is not.
Even when we (wisely) refuse to claim that we understand religion, at the level
of commonsense, we are fairly certain that we know at least what counts as reli-
gious data. Max Weber, for instance, began his 1922 sociological study of reli-
gion by refusing to define his subject matter: “To define ‘religion,’ to say what
it is, is not possible at the start of a presentation such as this. Definition can be
attempted, if at all, only at the conclusion of the study. The essence of religion
is not even our concern, as we make it our task to study the conditions and
effects of a particular type of social behaviour” (Weber 1964: 1). The assump-
tion here seems to be that what counts as the “stuff” of religion is so obvious
and self-evident that it can be identified and studied without even knowing,
in Weber’s words, “what it is.” Perhaps this assumption is true at the level of
commonsense and popular discussion, but it tends to lead to confusion and
contradiction at the level of academic analysis. Some of the most important
theorists of religion—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud spring immediately to

mind—not only fail to define religion, but actually describe it in conflicting
and inconsistent terms, in terms that suggest multiple definitions of religion.
Marx, for instance, in a single paragraph, calls religion “[alienated] man’s
self-consciousness and self-awareness,” an “inverted world-consciousness,”
“the general theory of [the] world,” a “general basis of consolation and justifi-
cation,” a “fantastic realization of the human being,” and the “spiritual aroma”
of the world (Marx 1978a: 53–54). These comments are really theoretical or
explanatory assertions, but they also have significant definitional force: Marx
assumes that religion is some sort of affect-laden intellection and proceeds to
circumscribe the subject matter of that intellection in several different—per-
haps mutually exclusive—ways. Freud does no better: Religion is sometimes a
set of (false) beliefs (Freud [1927] 1989), delimited in terms of their supernatu-
ralism; at other times, it is constituted by a set of (ritualistic and obsessional)
practices (Freud 1907).
These examples of inconsistency regarding the question of what religion is—
and the examples could be multiplied—raise a further concern that is directly rel-
evant for what follows: the question of defining definition. In the case of religious
studies, the issue of definition overlaps so extensively with the issue of general
theories that, in some instances, the two appear to be almost entirely coextensive.
How are we to separate the two concerns? Can they be separated?
The short answer is “No, not entirely,” because the concept of religion is a suffi-
ciently artificial or synthetic construct such that its very creation is itself an implicit
theorization of cultural realities. As Russell McCutcheon puts it,
it is the act of scholarship itself that . . . “invents” such categories as religion,

myth, ritual, sacrifice, pilgrimage, etc., uses them to construct theoretical
“models” of how minds or institutions work, and then “maps” these mod-
els onto what might otherwise simply be termed observable human behav-
iours. (McCutcheon 1998: 52)
What this means, of course, is that no statement about what religion is can avoid
at least partially explaining what religion does, where it comes from, and how it
works. Nonetheless, in what follows, attention will be directed primarily to explicit
efforts within the study of religion to define the concept—that is, to determine
its fixed limits, to offer a precise descriptive characterization of it—rather than to
those various theoretical assays that may have implicit definitional import. Still,
it should be kept in mind throughout that each and every definition of religion
implies at least some theoretical conclusions, while any effort to theorize religion
is, concomitantly, utterly dependent on, and even derivative from, the way in
which the concept is defined in the first place.1
On the Definition of Religion 19
Some Major Scholarly Contributions

The effort to define religion is as old as the academic study of religion itself.
F. Max Müller, who is sometimes credited with the “invention” of modern reli-
gious studies (see especially Masuzawa 1993: 58–60; Sharpe 1986: 27–28, 30–31,
31 n. 7), delineates “religion” proper from the “myths” with which he is more con-
cerned (and for the study of which he is more renowned). Religion, for Müller, is
quite broadly the primitive intuition and adoration of God, the “perception of the
infinite,” the natural and transcultural awareness that some Other is responsible
for one’s own existence and that of the world (Müller 1882: 21, cf. 22–23; Masuzawa
1993: 67, 192–193 n. 42; Morris 1987: 93).2
The late-19th-century anthropological pioneers of religious studies, E. B. Tylor
and J. G. Frazer, who criticized Müller’s philological focus, did not dramatically
depart from his understanding of what religion was. Tylor’s uniquely straightfor-
ward “minimum definition of religion, [as] the belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor
1871: 383) arises out of what he characterized as a primitive (characteristic of “the
lower races”) conception of ghosts (Tylor 1871: 387). It is on this basis—i.e., defin-
ing religion exclusively or primarily in terms of conscious mental activity: “I am
religious because I believe that gods exist”—that he could easily divide and catego-
rize three distinct and historically successive ways of thinking about nature: magi-
cal, religious, and scientific. Frazer, likewise, not only invoked this same threefold
typology, but also argued that it represented successive stages in human intel-
lectual evolution. Religion, he claimed, is to be defined in terms of “propitiation
or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control
the course of nature and of human life” (Frazer 1933: 50; cf. Morris 1987: 104).
Although some effort is made here to clarify what is meant by “spiritual” (i.e.,
superior to human beings) and although a dimension of behavioral or emotional
connection (a desire to propitiate a personal agency of some sort) is introduced
into the definition, Frazer’s conception is no less focused on the intellectual con-
tent of belief than is Tylor’s. Religion is just a particular way of understanding the
world, characterized, in contrast to both “magic” and “science,” by its personalized
and non-mechanistic dimension and destined to be overtaken by more progres-
sive modes of thought by virtue of its essential falsity.
This intellectualist approach to religion can be traced back to David Hume
and persists up to the present, including cognitive theorists of religion today
(e.g., Sperber 1996; more on this in chapter 5); such an approach is linked to the
interests and projects of the Enlightenment. The classical definitions of Müller,
Tylor, and Frazer focus on the belief in gods (or “spiritual beings”) and in so doing
make the (mental) positing of some nontemporal realm the defining hallmark
of religion.3 Tylor’s and Frazer’s definitions, however, are even more revealing
than Müller’s, for they provide us with a contrast between two distinguishable
domains: religion and science. Hence it should be clear in this case that (at least
part of) the guiding impulse for intellectualist definitions of religion is the arche-
typal Enlightenment contrast between “dogma” on the one hand and “rational and
scientific” knowledge on the other. The Enlightenment appeal to sovereign reason
(in contrast to “dogma”) was itself a rhetorical move in a larger political program
in which ecclesiastical institutions (and the late absolutisms that derived some
measure of legitimacy from them) could be subjected to persuasive critique from
outside of the institutions in question. That the earliest academic efforts to define
religion bear traces of this political program, albeit a century or more later, should
alert us to the possibility that “religion” itself may be a discursive invention of
modernity, and especially of Enlightenment; its cogency may depend on the socio-
political circumstances and agenda of the Modern world.4 This is not to say that
Tylor and Frazer—much less Müller—were necessarily advancing the political
interests of the Enlightenment but, rather, that the success of the Enlightenment
project had created an entity, “religion,” which these later thinkers attempted to
theorize. That they, and those who followed them in this approach, did so in terms
of tacit Enlightenment presuppositions (with their attendant political implica-
tions) should therefore hardly surprise us.
Another body of efforts to define religion has attempted to do so in terms of the
precise character of its connection to, or function within, other aspects of human
reality; that is, a given phenomenon is identified as a religious phenomenon less
because of its intellectual or propositional content and more in terms of the task the
phenomenon serves with respect to psychological, social, or political operations:
Functionalists prefer to define “religion” not in terms of what is believed

by the religious but in terms of how they believe it (that is, in terms of the
role belief plays in people’s lives). Certain individual or social needs are
specified and religion is identified as any system whose beliefs, practices or
symbols serve to meet those needs. (Clarke and Byrne 1993: 7)
The superiority of this approach lies not least in its recognition of the
extra-intellectual aspects of religion, in its appreciation that the spectrum of phe-
nomena embraced by the term “religion” includes powerful emotional states, par-
ticular types of action and, of course, serious consequences for behavior, rather
than consisting exclusively of a set of (mistaken) mental conclusions. Moreover,
by stressing the work that religion performs, whether at the individual or the social
level, functional definitions allow for a more complex understanding of the vari-
ous different forms taken, historically or individually, by diverse religious phe-
nomena, and thus they make it possible to avoid the peculiar problem for the
intellectualist approach that religious belief has not ceased with the advent the of
Age of Science.
The classic functionalist definition of religion is that of Émile Durkheim,

a French sociologist whose 1912 work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
(Durkheim 1995) marked a watershed in genuinely sociological investigation
of religious phenomena. Durkheim, unlike those who preceded him, sought to
explain not so much the original genesis of religion in the mists of the past as the
grounds for its persistence and diversity in the present. His investigation of what
was then known as totemism (a concern of many of his academic predecessors),
which he thought to be the “original form” of religious belief and practice, was
designed to reveal the social functions of religion in their most elementary—and
hence obvious—form, rather than to posit a specific event that “got the ball roll-
ing.” Noting that earlier definitions of religion, which focused on the “supernatu-
ral” or on “divinities,” had misconstrued the nature of religious belief (warping it
too far in the direction of modern manifestations of religious belief), Durkheim
proposed instead a definition of religion based on the distinction between sacred
and profane: “a religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to
sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden” (Durkheim 1995: 44).
What is meant by this distinction may seem strange at first, for as far as Durkheim
is concerned, it has nothing to do with a specific quality, such as holiness or good-
ness, or supernatural characteristics; in fact, the content of each of the categories
is, if we follow Durkheim, essentially arbitrary. Anything can be sacred in a given
society, provided only that it is not profane, and vice versa. A visitor to New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, will find in the collection a medieval
reliquary containing a (supposed) tooth of Mary Magdalene. There are few people
who would argue that individual teeth are sacred objects in and of themselves, and
no one would describe Christianity as a religion that asserts teeth to be sacred. A
tooth is a perfectly ordinary object, with little or no metaphysical significance. But
once a given tooth has been, to use Durkheim’s words, set apart, it may acquire
such significance. Placing this particular tooth in a reliquary has served literally to
set it apart: Its sacrality is a function of a somewhat arbitrary distinction, by which
this tooth, of all teeth, is considered sacred, without in any way suggesting that all
teeth have sacred content or importance.
If there is no fixed content to the distinction between “sacred” and “profane,”
if the distinction is purely formal and arbitrary, what is its point? According to
Durkheim, the distinction is to be traced back to totemism and specifically the
claim that the totem was somehow special or set apart. Because the totem is under-
stood to be a representation of the group itself—“the flag of the clan” (Durkheim
1995: 222)—Durkheim concludes that the point of the sacred–profane distinction
is to offer a representation for society as a whole or, by the same token, for the feel-
ing of “effervescence” that accompanies occasions of communal solidarity. It sets
something aside as “special,” whose special character, defined by the group, turns
out to be the group itself. Religion is thus the symbolization of the whole of the
social body; that is, religion is defined by its social function rather than by any dis-
tinctively religious content. By such a definition, the flag, for instance—at least in
the United States—is an object of genuinely religious veneration. Conversely, for
Durkheim, those practices and institutions that go by the name of magic, which
bears many of the supernatural characteristics (i.e., content) of what is ordinarily
designated as religion, are excluded from this category by virtue of their private
character: There is no “church of magic” (1995: 42); as a private act, magic cannot
fulfil precisely the social functions by which Durkheim can identify a phenom-
enon as a religious one.
One could apply the functionalist mode of defining religion in ways other than
those adopted by Durkheim, of course. From a Freudian perspective, for instance,
religion could be functionally defined in terms of its collective obsessional char-
acter (Freud 1907); thus religion is identified in terms of its task of providing a
neurotic outlet for the social necessity of the repression of antisocial drives (see
also Freud 1961). Marx’s understanding of religion as ideology might similarly
fit the bill: Religion, from a Marxian perspective, might be defined in terms of its
function to occlude the truth and provide mystic consolation for the afflictions of
this world.5
There are, in addition, those definitions that understand religion in terms of some
basic and irrepressible human instinct, an impulse toward the ultimate or infinite
that cannot be reduced to (translated into) any other type of human needs, such as
material consolation or psychological gratification. The human being is thus under-
stood as a homo religiosus—a being fundamentally hardwired with an orientation
toward a greater and awesome “Other.” Such is the definition of religion, implicit
or explicit, in the work of thinkers such as Rudolf Otto or, somewhat more recently,
Mircea Eliade. Otto described religion in terms of the individual’s—and this focus
on the individual is important to note—unique experience of the mysterium tremen-
dum et fascinans, a personal encounter with the numinous whose overpowering and
fundamentally ineffable character renders mere human existence contingent and
small (Otto 1969). Eliade, somewhat similarly, took religion to be the individual’s
apprehension of, or orientation to, what he termed the “sacred”: Religion consists
of those beliefs, practices, rituals and feelings that are directed toward the center,
the primal time, the “zone of absolute reality” (Eliade 1954: 17–18). Such definitions
of religion as these are of course non- and even anti-reductionistic. Otto, Eliade,
and others who adopt such an understanding of religion aim to ensure by their
very act of defining it this way that—unlike functional definitions—an “explaining
away” of religion in extra-religious terms is impossible. It goes unnoticed that such
approaches themselves also “reduce” religious phenomena to a language foreign to
(and not necessarily congenial to) the devotee.
Finally, one of the most concerted and explicit efforts to define religion may
be found in Clifford Geertz’s essay “Religion as a Cultural System” (Geertz
1966). Geertz attempted to be as thorough and precise as possible, while provid-

ing a definition that would allow anthropologists, including those working with
non-Western traditions, to approach religion in a productive way. This is his dense
and multipart definition:
Religion is (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, per-
vasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating
conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these concep-
tions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations
seem uniquely realistic. (Geertz 1966: 4)
Notwithstanding devastating and extended critique from several different direc-

tions (especially Asad 1993, Frankenberry and Penner 1999; cf. McCutcheon 2004:
321–326), this extended and detailed definition has been extraordinarily influen-
tial, and it is not easily categorized as either functional or substantivist, reduction-
istic or nonreductionistic. Geertz payed careful attention to both the intellectual
and emotive aspects of religion, as well as to its symbolic function within a given
culture. Of all the important academic definitions of religion, Geertz’s at least ini-
tially appears to be the most careful and thorough—and probably the least open to
charges of special pleading.
Critical Evaluation
The various definitions of religion that have been suggested in the last hundred
years or so—a rather bewildering array, in fact—might be more easily appre-
hended and understood in terms of a simple twofold typology. The first category
may be designated as substantivist definitions of religion. Such definitions, regard-
less of the actual and specific content imputed to religion, locate the definition of
religion within its key internal attributes. That is, religion is, and can be identified
by, particular features that inhere in its particular expressions. These features may
be the necessary and sufficient qualities for designating a given phenomenon as
“religious,” or they may constitute the elements of a system of “family resem-
blances” whereby no single feature is absolutely required for a phenomenon to
be—more or less—religious (Clarke and Byrne 1993: 11–15; Saler 1993).
The second category defines religion in terms of what a phenomenon accom-
plishes for the social or individual context in which it occurs, or in terms of the use
to which it is put; that is, these definitions are essentially functionalist. As already
noted in connection with Durkheim, one result of functionalist definitions of reli-
gion is that they make the content of it wholly arbitrary. One person’s “sacred,” as
it turns out, is someone else’s “profane.” We have chosen to call such definitions
culturalist because they tend to identify religion in terms of some fixed cultural
Table 1.1 Types of Definitions of Religion and their Characteristics
Characteristic Substantivist Definitions Culturalist Definitions
basis of definition ontological functionalist
point of religious refers to religious objects symbolic, communicative

language
content cross-culturally stable arbitrary, historically specific
referent extra-mundane mundane
value of religion good or bad often neutral
role, whether in a reductionist fashion or not, and because the data they demarcate
varies from one cultural to another.
Each type of definition—in spite of the variety internal to each type—tends to
have a number of different, shared characteristics (see table 1.1).
Not all theorists or definitions are equally susceptible to easy categorization,
but the foregoing typology may suggest some of the salient features—and perhaps
even some of the strengths and weaknesses—of each type of approach to defining
religion.
The attributes most commonly associated with the several substantivist defini-
tions of religion have to do, of course, with things “supernatural” or “spiritual.” There
are two major problems here. The first is that the definition of religion in terms
of spiritual or supernatural content, while seemingly straightforward, actually only
defers the question: We are left wondering how to define “spiritual” or “supernatu-
ral,” neither of which, it turns out, is much easier to define clearly than is religion
itself. We may wish to clarify what is meant by “spiritual” in a variety of ways, but
the problem does not go away. For instance, we cannot say that “‘spiritual’ refers to
entities that are not real”; not only does this beg the question of the referential truth-
fulness of religion, as well as the question of what is meant by “real,” but it addition-
ally would imply that novelistic fictions, such as, say, Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights, fall into the category of religion, while real human beings, such
as Jesus or Mohammad, do not. Nor can we say that “‘spiritual’ refers to strictly non-
material entities,” because such a definition could include all ideas and concepts.
Nor is it clear that animistic religions, for example, posit any alternative or nonmate-
rial order at all. All definitions of religion in terms of spirit-like or god-like entities—
whether the classical definition of Tylor, more recent anthropological definitions like
that of Spiro (1966), or current cognitively oriented definitions (e.g., Sperber 1996;
especially interesting is Stowers 2007: 14–15)—come to grief on precisely this issue:
They assume a distinction based on an intuitive modern understanding of “religion,”
which they then read into the data, separating things that their own stated definition,
rigorously applied, would not actually distinguish (Zeus from Superman, imaginary
friends from spirits, etc.; cf. also Atran 2002: 13–14).
The second problem with substantivist definitions is that they assume, without
giving any particularly good reasons why, that whatever characteristics they identify
as constitutive of religion are important characteristics. Why, as later chapters will
ask, is it important for us to distinguish between a political activity and a religious
activity? Even if the two could be separated, why bother? Or again, on what basis
should we draw a line between ourselves as human beings and the gods? Why invoke
such a subtle distinction when there are other, possibly much more consequential
ones to be made? To put it differently: One could, if he or she wanted to, come up
with a definition for “blue” that allowed them to categorize almost anything in the
world as “blue” or “not-blue.” But simply being able to do so would not mean that
the distinction was useful for anything, or that academics should start construct-
ing general, testable theories of blueness, or that universities should start opening
departments for the study of blue. So, in addition to working with what appears to
be an essentially ad hoc and/or taken-for-granted (and ultimately incoherent) defi-
nition of religion, substantivist definitions also tend to take the significance of that
definition—and of those social actors and activities it demarcates—for granted.
Culturalist or functionalist definitions, by contrast, at least avoid this latter
problem. By describing religion in terms of a particular cultural, social, or psycho-
logical function, culturalist definitions from the start impute a distinctive practical
significance (and hence, by extension, an obvious intellectual significance) to the
phenomena they identify. But their definitional success remains open to question.
The biggest problem with such culturalist definitions is that, although they provide
good criteria for including those phenomena we normally and unselfconsciously
designate “religious” within the category of “religion,” they usually do not offer
any substantial grounds for excluding certain phenomena that we normally do not
consider religious. This seems to be part of the reason that neither Marx nor Freud
employed functionalist definitions of religion in spite of developing functionalist
theories of religion: Religion may serve a mystifying, consoling, or neurotic func-
tion without by any means being the only social entity that does so. Literature,
philosophy, or even television today, might fulfil such functions, all without being
religious in any discernible way. Perhaps this only means that we need to recon-
sider the parameters of religion; but if we do so in any substantial way, what we are
dealing with is really no longer “religion” at all. Thus, ironically, it is the absence of
the very feature whose (indefinable and question-begging) presence is ruinous for
substantivist definitions that turns out to be the central weakness of culturalist or
functionalist definitions. If, say, Marxism, television, the United States flag, and
driving on the right side (or left side) of the road can all be called religious, the
term is so broad as to be meaningless, and needs to be replaced.
Geertz, while offering essentially what we have called a culturalist definition

of religion, attempts to avoid this problem by specifying within his definition the
kinds of topics with which religion deals, but leaving the actual content of those top-
ics open, historically contingent, and hence potentially arbitrary. Geertz suggests
that, although religion may be recognized essentially in its function to provide a
culturally shared system of symbols, evoking moods and motivations that seem
uniquely realistic (Geertz 1966: 4), such function circumscribes somewhat the
content of the symbols that are used in this fashion. Driving on the right side
of the road, for instance, may indeed depend on an emotionally charged symbol
system, but it is recognized to be strictly conventional and hence has no “uniquely
realistic” component. Even the cultural symbolism used to represent such things
as awe at the wonders of nature is at least theoretically ruled out of Geertz’s defini-
tion of religion:
The symbols or symbol systems which induce and define dispositions we

set off as religious and those which place those dispositions in a cosmic
framework are the same symbols ought to occasion no surprise. For what
else do we mean by saying that a particular mood of awe is religious and not
secular except that it springs from entertaining a conception of all-pervading
vitality like mana and not from a visit to the Grand Canyon? (Geertz 1966: 12,
emphasis added)
But it is precisely at this point that the definition starts to become circular. Geertz
here assumes a distinction between mana and the Grand Canyon, rather than
providing any grounds for it. His notion that one symbol system pertains to “a
conception of all-pervading vitality,” while the other does not, is simply a restate-
ment, without elaboration or argument, that one is religious and the other is not.
The characteristic referents of religious symbols—“a general order of existence,”
“all-pervading vitality,” and so on—are sufficiently vague that they can be (and are)
simply attributed to those phenomena that Geertz already believes to be religious
(on the basis, it seems, of a priori judgments that actually are not functions of the
definition itself), without providing any compelling reason to avoid associating
these referents with other (i.e., nonreligious) phenomena—phenomena he some-
how already knows to be, in fact, nonreligious.
It therefore turns out that Geertz’s effort to specify the function of religion
more precisely in terms of the generally human desire to assert in the face of life’s
torments and unintelligibility its ultimate comprehensibility and sense does not,
despite appearances, much clarify things. On the one hand, not all of the phenom-
ena identified by Geertz as religious serve to make sense of the cosmos. Religious
practices, for instance, seem more concerned with building or reinforcing com-
munal solidarity than asserting the meaningfulness of creation: Even when some
(and certainly not all!) of those practices are rationalized through recourse to sym-
bol systems that do assert cosmic order, the practices themselves are normally
understood to be intrinsically religious, quite without recourse to their developed
theological rationalizations (cf. Asad 1993: 36). On the other hand, there are phe-
nomena that do attempt this, including scientific research and political ideologies
(whether Marxism’s evolutionary notions or capitalism’s rationalizations about the
invisible hand of the market—and surely these latter would fall into the category
of religion by almost any of the definitions so far discussed),6 that are, according to
both Geertz and commonsense, not religious at all. In other words, it appears that
this characteristic—asserting the sensibility of the cosmos—is neither necessary
nor sufficient for a phenomenon to be designated as “religious” and hence has no
definitional import at all.
In addition, it must be conceded that any effort to define religion as such (i.e.,
as a human entity, culturally and functionally determined or otherwise, that is
meaningfully distinct from other types of human cultural production) entails an
implication or assumption that religion is, in fact, sui generis. It appears impos-
sible to avoid this unfortunate conclusion, even within functionalist approaches
to religion. “[T]he insistence that religion has an autonomous essence—not to be
confused with the essence of science, or of politics, or of common sense—invites
us to define religion (like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phe-
nomenon” (Asad 1993: 28). The reverse is also true, of course: If we define reli-
gion in transhistorical or transcultural terms, we are necessarily imputing to it a
fixed essence, a project recently given new life by cognitive approaches to religion,
which seem to place the imprimatur of science upon what is, in effect, a folk taxon
(see chapter 5). As no one has yet isolated that essential kernel without invoking
specific and specifically theological assumptions, perhaps it is time—at least for
students of the humanities and social sciences—to abandon the effort altogether.
Prospects: The Argument of this Book

What, then, is to be done? What shall we do with this intractable word and con-
cept that, on the one hand, we seem unable to do without and that, on the other,
we are incapable of defining in any coherent way? One possibility is to acknowl-
edge the artificiality of the concept, but not to abandon it on that account. This
suggestion recognizes the synthetic or arbitrary nature of most mental categories
(see especially Lakoff 1987) and so concludes that there is no especial difficulty in
using “religion” taxonomically—even if it fails to correspond perfectly to some real
object in the world—as long as our intellectual creativity in so doing is kept firmly
in mind.7 The difficulty with such a view is that the utility of religion as a taxon
is only a function of its persistence in our very particular, historically contingent,
modern and Western commonsense views of the human universe. To assert that
this makes its use inevitable or even valuable is akin to suggesting that the idea
of the soul should be pursued—albeit with a recognition of its strictly taxonomic
character—by psychology. This will not do.
Instead, the academic future of religion as a concept will need to focus on
deconstructing the category and analyzing its function within popular discourse
(as in, e.g., chapter 3), rather than assuming that the category has content and
seeking to specify what that content is. That task was already begun 20 years ago,
and with considerable success, by Talal Asad (Asad 1993; cf. Asad 2003). Asad
argues not only that the concept of religion as a universal entity is incoherent
but, further, that past (or non-Western) forms of what we would identify as “reli-
gion” operated in terms of mechanisms and self-understandings that we no longer
associate with religion as such. Instead, he argues, the concept of religion as we
understand it (and hence tend to define it) is a by-product of the special historical
and political circumstances of Western modernity (Asad 1993: 28, 39–43, 47–48).
As Asad puts it:
Several times before the Reformation, the boundary between the religious
and the secular was redrawn, but always the formal authority of the Church
remained preeminent. In later centuries, with the triumphant rise of mod-
ern science, modern production, and the modern state, the churches would
also be clear about the need to distinguish the religious from the secular,
shifting, as they did so, the weight of religion more and more onto the
moods and motivations of the individual believer. Discipline (intellectual
and social) would, in this period, gradually abandon religious space, letting
“belief,” “conscience,” and “sensibility” take its place. (Asad 1993: 39)
In other words, our definitions of religion, especially insofar as they assume a

privatized and cognitive character behind religion (as in religious belief, or experi-
ence, or sentiment), simply reflect (and assume as normative) the West’s distinc-
tive historical feature of the secularized state. Religion, precisely, is constructed
in scholarship and law as that which is not social, not coercive, is individual, is
belief-oriented, and so on, because in our day and age there are certain apparently
freestanding cultural institutions, such as the church, that are excluded from the
political state (e.g., in the tradition of exempting churches from certain forms
of taxation). Thus, Asad notes, it is no coincidence that it is the period after the
so-called “Wars of Religion” in the 17th century that saw the first universalist defi-
nitions of religion (on the centrality of these events and their discursive import for
the modern invention of religion, see Cavanaugh 2009); and those definitions of
“Natural Religion,” of course, stressed the propositional—as opposed to the politi-
cal or institutional—character of religion as a function of their historical context
(Asad 1993: 40–41).
Because these views, as noted above, do indeed bolster the normative character
of the separation of state from cultural institutions,8 the concept of religion serves
modern political ends and reflects modern political circumstances. Again, quot-
ing Asad:
It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges

with the liberal demand in our time that it be kept quite separate from
politics, law, and science—spaces in which varieties of power and reason
articulate our distinctively modern life. This definition is at once part of a
strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians)
of the defence of religion. (Asad 1993: 28)
But it is necessary to go even farther than this, as the following chapters argue:
The very concept of religion as such—as an entity with any distinction whatsoever
from other human phenomena—is a function of these same processes and his-
torical moments that generate an individualistic concept of it (in fairness, Asad
[1993: 29] does hint at this). The concept of religion is a way of demarcating a cer-
tain sociopolitical reality that is only problematized with the advent of modernity
in which the state at least claims to eschew culture per se. Further, one of the cur-
rent political effects of this separation—one of the political ends served currently
by it—is the evisceration of substance (i.e., collective aims) from the state. That is
to say, the simple positing of religion as a coherent, distinct zone of human cogni-
tion, affectation, and action/organization is a covert justification for the modern
tendency of the state to frame itself in increasingly negative terms: The secular
state is the institutional apparatus by which the social body prevents the incursion
by others into the personal and various other goals of individuals, rather than
being the means of achievement for common projects and the collective good
(again, a point made emphatically by Cavanaugh 2009). This very definition of
the modern democratic state, in fact, creates religion as its alter ego (see especially
chapter 3): Religion, as such, is the space in which and by which any substan-
tive collective goals (salvation, righteousness, judgment, condemnation, etc.) are
individualized and made into a question of personal preference, commitment, or
morality. This phenomenon—the creation of the isolated, willful individual as the
subject of politics—is a feature of modernity, and as such it can be found in the
political theories of centuries past. But it clearly affects our present understanding
of politics as well. This effect is described succinctly as an ideological effect in our
own day by Slavoj Žižek:
[T]he form of consciousness that fits late-capitalist “post-ideological” soci-

ety—the cynical, “sober” attitude that advocates liberal “openness” in the
matter of “opinions” (everybody is free to believe whatever she or he wants;
this concerns only his or her privacy), disregards pathetic ideological

phrases and follows only utilitarian and/or hedonistic motivations—stricto
sensu remains an ideological attitude: it involves a series of ideological
presuppositions (on the relationship between “values” and “real life,” on
personal freedom, etc.) that are necessary for the reproduction of existing
social relations. (Žižek 1994: 15)
It is simultaneously ironic and appropriate that one of the most energetic new
directions in the study of religion over the last two decades has been, precisely, the
historicization of the idea of religion itself, largely along the lines charted by Asad.
It is ironic because such an endeavor must result in negative conclusions—that
there is no such thing as “religion,” that cross-cultural or nonspecific characteriza-
tions of so-called religious phenomena are distorting, that the phenomenology
of religion is in fact a phenomenology of the modern state, and so on—and so
the field is now littered with declarations of its own impossibility.9 It is appro-
priate, however, precisely because the recognition of this impossibility is prob-
ably the anthropological precondition for any (at least putatively) nonhegemonic
analysis of those types of practices that we moderns tend to designate as reli-
gious.10 “Religion,” in other words, may be an obstacle to cross-cultural (including
cross-temporal) understanding; hence it must be theorized as a concept for that
very reason. Such is the view promoted by the chapters that follow and by the
recent work of such scholars as Maurice Bloch (2008), Matt Day (2010), Daniel
Dubuisson (2003), Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), and Craig Martin (2009), all fol-
lowing, in their various ways, Talal Asad’s footsteps. The current state of the dis-
cussion is nicely summarized by Maurice Bloch:
The point of these historical excursions is to suggest that the separation

of religion from the transcendental social in general is, even in the places
where it appears at first to exist, superficial and transient. In any case, this
superficial phenomenon has occurred in human history only relatively
recently. . . . To explain religion is therefore a fundamentally misguided
enterprise. It is rather like trying to explain the function of headlights
while ignoring what motorcars are like and for. What needs to be explained
is the nature of human sociability, and then religion simply appears as an
aspect of this that cannot stand alone. (Bloch 2008: 2060)
The remaining chapters in this volume aim to unpack, in various ways, these
somewhat negative-sounding claims.
2
Words, Words, Wordbooks, or

Everything Old Is New Again
polonius: “What do you read, my lord?”

(Hamlet, Act II, Scene II)
over the past decade, we have witnessed the arrival of a new generation of hand-
books in the study of religion—handbooks, as opposed to dictionaries (e.g., von
Stuckrad 2005), encyclopedias (e.g., Jones 2005; Betz et al., 2006), and even essay
collections on the field (e.g., Antes et al. 2004). These handbooks owe some-
thing to Critical Terms for Literary Study (Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1990; 2nd
ed. 1995), a hard-hitting (though, admittedly, still largely “Western” in its focus)
source for essays on such common lit-crit topics as author, canon, discourse,
intention, text, etc. In turn, it is likely Raymond Williams’s now classic Keywords:
A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published 30 years ago (1983; rev. ed.
Bennett et al. 2005), that lies in the background of this genre’s recent emergence.
For those unfamiliar with it, Keywords’ succinct entries not only trace the history of
usage but also consistently inscribe such terms as aesthetic, elite, history, popular,
etc. within a coherent theoretical approach (in his case, Marxist literary/culture
theory). Despite the obvious difficulties of accomplishing such coherency in any
multi-authored work, Critical Terms for Literary Study is useful precisely because it
unfailingly treats “literature” as a datum in need of theorization, rather than as an
expressive gift whose meaning needs only to be interpreted and appreciated.
In the fall of 1996, with these two works in mind, Willi Braun and Russell
McCutcheon set about planning a users’ manual to the field (though they pre-
ferred to see it in the tradition of a field guide [2000]).1 At the time, they thought
that developing such a resource in the study of religion was a novel idea; how-
ever, as with many good ideas, they soon learned that they were not the first
to arrive at the party, for Philip Quinn and Charles Taliaferro’s A Companion
to Philosophy of Religion was then near publication (1997) and, not long after
that, Mark C. Taylor’s Critical Terms for Religious Studies (1998) appeared. Soon
they also learned that John Hinnells, who had already edited other popular
reference works (e.g., 1997, 2003), was preparing a handbook of his own; after
changing presses (something he mentions in his introduction), it appeared as
The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (2005). Not long ago, his edited
handbook on ancient religions was also published (2007). Robert Segal’s The
Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion hit the bookshelves in 2006. So
where there was once almost no up-to-date resources ready to accompany the
student and the scholar of religion on their intellectual journeys (which is why,
perhaps—regardless of what one thought of its structure and content—the
publication of the first edition of Mircea Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion [1987]
was such a landmark event in the modern field2), readers can now choose from
a variety of willing and able companions.3 The question is this: Toward which
destination are these various handbooks guiding us?
Given that the volumes under consideration in this chapter have appeared over
the course of a decade, this genre shows no signs of going away anytime soon—in
fact, Robert Segal and Kocku von Stuckrad, both having already tried their hands at
editing such resources (twice on Segal’s part), are preparing yet another, this time
the multivolume Vocabulary for the Study of Religion (currently scheduled for publi-
cation in 2013). Given increased market pressures in academic publishing over the
past decade, anyone who has recently pitched an idea to a publisher, or completed
the marketing questionnaire when submitting a final manuscript for copyedit-
ing, knows that projects with possible classroom application grab the imagination
of publishers now more than ever. Although they are hardly textbooks, from the
point of view of publishers, these handbooks embody the best of both worlds:
While holding out the promise of attracting first-rate authors to the press (authors
who may individually return with future projects, thereby building a press’s stable
of proven authors), these volumes can be marketed as both reference and course
materials, thereby opening up sales possibilities that the average scholarly mono-
graph would never hope to match.
For this reason alone, these handbooks constitute a genre worth considering,
as their very existence is evidence that our field now has a sufficiently large buying
public (i.e., students) to attract the sustained interest of so many different publish-
ers. This surplus of resources therefore comprises a bit of a watershed moment
for the modern English-language field; such volumes undoubtedly line the shelves
of graduate students’ library study carrels and have more than likely been ordered
by a number of instructors as auxiliary or main texts for any number of courses
or have had portions reproduced in course reading packages. Moreover, with such
new resources now so widely available, it appears that our need to rely on outdated
or out-of-print phenomenological handbooks (e.g., the late Eric Sharpe’s pithy
Fifty Key Words: Comparative Religion [1971]) has finally come to an end.4
Words, Words, Wordbooks, or Everything Old Is New Again 33
But, as any phenomenologist can tell you, appearances can be misleading.

Despite the general uniformity of the various volumes that comprise this genre
(e.g., they’re all rather close in size [ranging between Chicago’s relatively com-
pact 200,000 words to Blackwell’s roughly 330,000 words on philosophy of reli-
gion], in organization [e.g., whereas all focus on keywords and/or concepts, some
also include surveys of thematic issues, disciplinary approaches, and some of the
world’s religions], and sometimes even overlap considerably in content [e.g., essays
on gender appear in three of the volumes, myth and/or ritual in three as well,
modernity and/or postmodernity in four of them]), the differences among some of
their articles are telling. For much like Sharpe’s earlier “compact and elementary
work” (as he phrases it in his preface), which mainly focused on the descriptive
categories that were once popular in our field (e.g., ancestor worship, animism,
fertility, mana, taboo, etc., a number of which were simply generalized from their
earlier usage within Christianity, e.g., eschatology, God, incarnation), some of
these recent volumes reproduce, to varying degrees, this old vocabulary—in some
cases with great fidelity. We find major articles on such topics as liberation, pil-
grimage, and sacrifice, not to mention essays on theology understood as but one
more path open to the scholar of religion. It would appear then, that, apart from
adding more words to the sorts of entries we find in Sharpe’s compact book, little
may have changed since the earlier days of phenomenological handbooks.
Here is a case in point: Because of his always strongly argued advocacy for
the study of religion as a nontheological, social scientific pursuit—in fact, distin-
guishing among these various approaches, and supporting the social scientific,
constitutes the main topic of his volume’s introduction—it is worth stopping
for a moment to consider Segal’s inclusion of theology as being, in his words,
one of the approaches or disciplines that has “contributed to the understanding
of the phenomenon of religion.”5 However, his introduction indicates that, like
Thomas Ryba’s chapter on “The Phenomenology of Religion,” the theology chap-
ter’s author, Ian Markham—who defines theology’s task as “the attempt to arrive
at a systematic account of God and of God’s relations with the world” (194) and
who identifies himself as a theologian with “a positive view of the task of theol-
ogy” (195)—will document how theology has incorporated “various cultural influ-
ences,” not the other way around (xviii). In highlighting this point, Segal seems to
be suggesting that the chapter is more of an ethnography of theology, inasmuch as
elite religious discourse may rightly constitute an instance of data for the scholar
of religion—i.e., historicizing theology by demonstrating that it has been shaped
by sources other than so-called religious inspiration. This, however, seems at odds
with the chapter’s placement in the opening “Approaches” section, which suggests
instead that theology is not data but, instead, one of the viable methodological
options for a scholar of religion—“none of which,” Segal informs his readers, “is
likely to exhaust the subject” (xvii).6
Unlike in his own writings, in which theological discourse (much like those
behaviors that we commonly term rituals and the narratives that go by the name
of myths) clearly constitutes but one among the many topics that a scholar of reli-
gion might study, theology’s place in Segal’s edited volume is therefore rather
ambivalent, as it is but one among such other disciplinary options as anthropol-
ogy, psychology, sociology, etc. Perhaps Segal’s aim in including a chapter devoted
to Christian theology (“although,” as Markham promises, dividing the world into
two curious halves, “links will be made to non-Christian traditions” [195; emphasis
added]) is merely intended to represent the current field accurately, rather than, as
in his own work, to prescribe the shape that it ought to be taking; after all, the field
is still largely populated by theologians and humanists, and the editor of such a
handbook might wish to take that into consideration. If so, it is unfortunate that
an opportunity to help shape the future field, with a forward-looking resource,
resulted in a mere portrait of the current field’s odd shape. Or perhaps—and this
is no less speculative than the rationale just offered—Segal’s longtime position in
the United Kingdom accounts for theology’s inclusion as but one more disciplin-
ary option in the modern field. As Hinnells writes in his volume’s introduction,
“[i]n America there are indications of a growing difference, whereas in Britain
the two [i.e., theology and religious studies] appear to be coming closer together”
(1)—something evident in the theology chapter in Hinnells’s volume, written by
David Ford (himself a professor of divinity at the University of Cambridge), which
clearly treats theological method as being among the many resources available to
the scholar of religion, inasmuch as it focuses mainly on academic Christian theol-
ogy “as pursued in universities and other advanced teaching and research insti-
tutions, especially in settings variously called departments of religion, religious
studies, theology and religious studies, theology and divinity” (61). Accordingly,
theology is understood as a pursuit that “seeks wisdom in relation to questions,
such as those of meaning, truth, beauty and practice, which are raised by, about
and between the religions and are pursued through engagement with a range of
academic disciplines” (62), as well as the process of “seeking wisdom through
fundamental questions in the context of dialogue between radical commitments”
(78). Despite the recognition of the largely Christian nature of not only the term
but also the goal of theology (i.e., “The term ‘theology’ is often considered suspect
among Jewish thinkers” [73]), after detailed sections on the history of Christian
theology, its place in the modern university, and its many types (we were intrigued
to learn that there are in fact five [69–71]), the chapter nonetheless includes short
sections on Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist theologies (or, as Ford rephrases
it, each of their respective “intellectual traditions of thought” [76]), before closing
with some thoughts on the future of Christian theology within the academy. We
would be remiss if we did not draw attention to the fact that only a liberal form of
theology occupies this chapter, inasmuch as one of its main contributions within
the academy seems to be the promise it supposedly holds for increased dialogue
through our shared search for wisdom—not something that Type 5 (fundamen-
talism) holds out, inasmuch as, in Ford’s words, it involves “a radical rejection
of other frameworks and worldviews” (70). Why such “radical rejection” swims
against the stream of the search for wisdom is not, however, explained.
Keeping in mind the odd placement of theology in some of these volumes, let
me step back and use Chicago’s volume as representative of how books in this
genre are arranged: The editor’s introduction opens each book,7 making a num-
ber of general claims about the field, its boundaries (or lack thereof), its object of
study, its historical development, etc., and ends by offering some suggestions on
how to use the volume. Critical Terms then proceeds with 22 substantive essays
(on the high end, there are almost 80 in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion), all
exclusively devoted to key concepts in the field—e.g., body, image, performance,
transformation, etc.—with each chapter between 5,000 and 6,000 words in
length and arranged alphabetically (though all of the other volumes are arranged
thematically, some with essays on methods, as well as topics or key terms [see
table 2.1]). Only Blackwell’s and Continuum’s volumes conclude with a complete
bibliography; the other volumes append reference sections and/or recommended
readings to each chapter.
Concerning the chapter topics, the curious mix of first-order phenomeno-
logical categories (e.g., God, liberation, relic, sacrifice) with second-order ana-
lytic categories (e.g., culture, modernity, territory) is evident in almost all of the
volumes under review. We say “curious” because, in all cases, no distinction is
drawn between these two orders of concepts. Case in point: Despite its opening
chapters devoted to the place of philosophical discourse in seven of the world’s
religions,8 Blackwell’s philosophy of religion volume makes the field’s unbleached
roots in the Protestant seminary model immodestly apparent, with chapters on
a host of familiar systematic theology (a.k.a. modern religious thought) topics,
including incarnation, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, miracles, peti-
tionary prayer, the problem of evil, and the trinity, not to mention entire chapters
devoted to each of the traditional proofs for the existence of God.9 Of course, we
ought to add that Paul Griffiths contributes a closing chapter in this volume, on
“Comparative Philosophy of Religion,” though it is exclusively concerned with
surveying so-called Western intellectual sources for strategies to help answer the
question: “What might it mean to think of philosophy of religion as compara-
tive?” Although his brief essay provides possible rationales and approaches for
doing comparative philosophy of religion—rationales steeped in but one of the
various philosophies that may, or so Griffiths suggests by way of a conclusion,
benefit from such a comparison—it does not actually do any comparative philoso-
phy of religion. As this volume therefore makes evident, shifting from reproduc-
ing elite participant (almost always theologically and politically liberal Christian)
Table 2.1 Handbook Parallels—Showing Structure, Content, and Authors for the Four Fieldwide Handbooks
Critical Terms for Religious Guide to the Study of Religion The Routledge Companion to the The Blackwell Companion to the
Studies (1998) (2000) Study of Religion (2005) Study of Religion (2006)
Introduction (Taylor) Prologue: Religion (Braun) Introduction (Hinnels) Introduction (Segal)
Why Study Religion? (Hinnells)
The Study of Religion in
Historical Perspective (Sharpe)
Description Key Approaches Approaches

Belief (Lopez) Definition (Arnal) Theories of Religion (Segal) Anthropology of Religion (Bowie)
Body (LaFleur) Classification (Smith) Theology (Ford) The Comparative Method (Roscoe)
Conflict (Lincoln) Comparison (Martin) Philosophy of Religion (Vardy) Economics of Religion (Stark)
Culture (Masuzawa) Interpretation (Penner) Religious Studies (Wiebe) Literature and Religion (Prickett)
Experience (Sharf) Sociology of Religion Phenomenology of Religion (Ryba)
Gender (Boyarin) Explanation (Riesebrodt/Konieczny) Philosophy of Religion (Taliaferro)
God (Schüssler Fiorenza/ Cognition (Lawson) Anthropology of Religion Psychology of Religion (Main)
Kaufman) Deprivation (White) (Hackett) Sociology of Religion (Davie)
Image (Miles) Ethnicity (MacKay) Psychology of Religion (Merkur) Theology (Markham)
Liberation (Surin) Exchange (Alles) Phenomenology of Religion
Modernity (Benavides) Experience (Fitzgerald) (Allen) Topics
Performance (Bell) Gender (Warne) Comparative Religion Body (Roberts)
Person (Winquist) Intellect (Pals) (W. Paden) Death and Afterlife (Davies)
Rationality (Stoller) Manifestation (Ryba) Ethics (Davis)
Relic (Schopen) Myth (McCutcheon) Key Issues Fundamentalism (Munson)
Religion, Religions, Religious Origin (Masuzawa) Gender (Juschka) Heaven and Hell (Russell)
(Smith) Projection (Guthrie) Insider/Outsider Problem (Knott) Holy Men/Holy Women
Sacrifice (Robbins) Rationality (Stark) Postmodernism (Heelas) (Cunningham)
Territory (Gill) Ritual (Grimes) Orientalism and the Study of Magic (Benavides)
Time (Aveni) Sacred (Anttonen) Religion (King) Modernity and Postmodernity
Transformation (Lawrence) Social Formation (Mack) Secularization (Fox) (Campbell)
Transgression (Taussig) Stratification (Benavides) Mysticism and Spirituality (King) Mysticism (Kripal)
Value (Wyschogrod) Structure (Sinding Jensen) New Religious Movements (Fox) Myth (Segal)
Writing (Tracy) World (Paden) Fundamentalism (Munson) Nationalism and Religion
Myth and Ritual (R. Segal) (Jurgensmeyer)
Location Religious Authority (Gifford) New Religious Movements
Modernism (Wiebe) Hermeneutics (Green) (Dawson)
Romanticism (McCalla) Religious Pluralism (Barnes) Pilgrimmage (Coleman)
Postmodernism (Wolfart) Religion and Politics (Moyser) Ritual (Bell)
Discourse (Murphy) Religion and Geography (Park) Secularization (Bruce)
Culture (Lincoln) Religion and Science (Dixon)
Colonialism (Chidester) Religion and Cognition (Martin)
Ideology (Lease) Religion and Culture (Hulsether)
Religion and the Arts (Hinnells)
Epilogue Migration,
Play (Gill) Diaspora . . . (McLoughlin)
References Consolidated Bibliography

discourses—and thereby authorizing them inasmuch as traditions of participant

reflection set the terms by means of which they will be studied—to redescribing
(i.e., theorizing, historicizing, etc.) these discourses as instances of human data
that stand out as significant only in light of a scholar’s curiosities and interests is
not something consistently carried out across the books that comprise this genre.
Their various contributors therefore do not seem to intend their words to accom-
pany people embarking on the same journey.
Sticking for the moment with these volumes’ contributors, an observation
worth mentioning is the pleasantly nonincestuous nature of these resources:
Unlike some other academic fields, even when judged internationally, ours is not
all that large, yet the number of authors who reappear across these volumes is
surprisingly low. By our count, of the 181 authors whose work appears in these
books (representative of a host of different institutions and national contexts,
though North American and European scholars clearly dominate), only a handful
pop up in more than one of the volumes. (In alphabetical order, they are the late
Catherine Bell, Gustavo Benavides, Sam Gill, Bruce Lincoln, Luther H. Martin,
Tomoko Masuzawa, William Paden, Thomas Ryba, Robert Segal, Jonathan Z.
Smith, Rodney Stark, Charles Taliaferro, and Donald Wiebe.) This strikes us as
quite a positive thing, because authoring handbook essays, to whatever extent, sets
an agenda for a subfield, and the last thing we need is a small number of voices
repeatedly driving home the same point. For precisely this reason it struck us as
somewhat odd to see that four of the authors in Hinnells’s Routledge Companion
appear twice in the same volume (i.e., Hinnells himself [quite apart from his intro-
duction, that is], as well as Judith Fox, Richard King, and Robert Segal), one of
whom (Segal) then edited his own handbook volume with a chapter of his own
there as well (on “Myth”)—a recurrence that, although possibly an editorial neces-
sity (what with the difficulty of securing commitments from already busy authors
to deliver their chapters on time), strikes us as less than desirable. Yet this small
repetition notwithstanding, the overlap in some of these volumes’ structures is
certainly not present in their lists of contributors.
The best of the essays in these volumes can be read by relative newcomers to the
field; they nicely survey the origins, development, current use, and possible future
(e.g., a category’s continued use or its long-overdue retirement) of the topic or
term in question, often drawing on a wide array of ethnographic and historic data
to demonstrate either the application or limitations of the term/method. Picking
just the Chicago volume for the moment, we could easily cite Jonathan Z. Smith’s
“Religion, Religions, Religious” as a suitable example of what these articles, at
their best, can accomplish, inasmuch as it problematizes the philosophical ideal-
ism that usually drives our field. It does so by making plain the manner in which
ancient notions of piety (from the Latin term pietas, naming a quality thought to
result from proper performance of rituals of deference that marked social place)
morph, beginning sometime around the 17th century, into what we today under-
stand as our modern sense of an internal sentiment or presocial experience. But
instead of Smith’s essay here, which was briefly discussed in our introduction, we
focus instead on two other essays in that volume: “Experience” by Robert Sharf and
“Belief” by Donald Lopez. Anyone still clinging to the once-popular notion that
scholars of religion are limited to studying the symbolic manifestations of a pri-
vate, prelinguistic, and thus asocial thing called “religious experience” or “belief”
simply must read these two essays carefully, along with, for example, Sharf’s essay
on Zen and Japanese Nationalism in Lopez’s edited volume from over a decade
ago, Curators of the Buddha (1995).10 Read together, they comprise a powerful cri-
tique of the work of those once represented by such early scholars as William
James—a tradition for which “meaning” or “intention” lurk somewhere in pris-
tine, originary moments that are nestled deep within either the human head (i.e.,
beliefs represented in creeds) or heart (i.e., feelings one can express), moments
that can only be exhibited externally in some secondary manner and embodied
within derivative public media, such as the still-popular triumvirate of myth, sym-
bol, and ritual.11 Although what we might call the neural or electrochemical events
(which hardly constitute what we commonly understand as meaningful experi-
ences) that lie behind reports of such internal states might be explained by the
work going on in the now-vigorous field of cognitive psychology of religion (e.g.,
Andresen 2001—though chapter 5 will look more closely at cognitive theories of
religion), Sharf and Lopez do not set out down that road; nor are they content with
mere phenomenological descriptions of participant disclosures. Instead, they each
offer a social redescription—to borrow a phrase from Smith (1975)—of their key
term, thereby retooling “experience” and “belief” as thoroughly interpretive and
therefore always political artifacts of prior social situations that challenge actors
to make (the active verb is used intentionally) sense of the settings in which they
find themselves—a sense-making that is a thoroughly public form of action. As
Lopez makes clear, “the statement, ‘I believe in . . .,’ is sensible only when there are
others who ‘do not’; it is an agonistic affirmation” (33; emphasis added). Rephrased,
we might say that participants do not walk around spontaneously disclosing their
beliefs, even if they have them prior to their public articulation (and this is itself
not entirely evident, for beliefs seem to not arise spontaneously; they are part of
a system of knowledge acquired by immersion in a social group). Rather, the for-
mulation of a coherent position on some topic is itself the residue of a previous,
observable social moment, one that likely prompts feelings of estrangement from
interests that, once bumped into, turn out not to be shared—such as when the
proverbial Other arrives on the scene, like a scholar with a notebook asking about
what you believe.12
In fact, this position on the behavioral and institutional causes of beliefs is
well in line with the empirical findings of such sociologists as Rodney Stark
(himself a contributor to Continuum’s [“Rationality”] and Blackwell’s [“Economics

of Religion”] handbooks), whose earlier work on conversion (co-written with
William Sims Bainbridge [e.g., 1980]) persuasively demonstrated that changes in
social affiliation do not occur because prior inner beliefs propel common collec-
tive behaviors. Thus, despite any conviction with which it might be reported, the
participant disclosure “I converted to X because of doctrine of Y” is more than
likely a hindsight rationalization; although it certainly tells you about how this
person now understands his or her past behavior, it sheds little light on the causes
of the behavior. Instead, new beliefs were found to result from changes in what
Stark and Bainbridge referred to as “interpersonal bonds” (1980: 1376)—changes
surely brought about by a host of different, mundane reasons, such as increas-
ingly developed feelings of affinity and shared interests (what they refer to as
“the affective bonds that constitute social networks” [1394]) that result from, for
example, happenstance associations in the workplace that lead to opportunities
to dine out with one’s colleagues, which produce invitations to their homes, fol-
lowed by attendance at children’s Little League baseball games, more potluck sup-
pers, a chance invitation to a bible study, participation in a worship service, etc.,
etc. Redescribing the social causes of faith, belief, and experience in this manner,
we are able to ascertain the empirical in rhetorics of the invisible; then, as that
old Depeche Mode song once put it, scholars are actually able to “reach out and
touch faith,” inasmuch as disclosures of belief and faith turn out to be evidence
of prior, observable social worlds. As aptly phrased by one of McCutcheon’s stu-
dents, whom he asked—to illustrate this very point—why he grew up to believe
that he liked the University of Alabama’s football team: “’Cuz my grandpa told me
to.” This shift toward seeing such things as identity, piety, faith, experience, and
belief as the eventually internalized remnants of prior, contingent public events
(i.e., membership in social networks that come with certain behavioral expecta-
tions that one must learn, at first coercively) is also well in line with the work of
recent scholars outside our field, such as Slavoj Žižek,13 who nicely captures this
social redescription of supposedly interior dispositions when, in reference to a
hypothetical person kneeling during a worship service, he writes (tipping his hat
to both Louis Althusser and Blaise Pascal): “[K]neel down and you shall believe
that you knelt down because of your belief—that is, [as if ] your following the ritual is
an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the ‘external’ ritual performa-
tively generates its own ideological foundation” (12–13). There may be no better
example of the difference between a theory of the mundane origins of participant
disclosures, on the one hand, and a mere repetition of what so-called believers are
already saying about themselves, on the other.
Despite the manner in which some of these essays further such theoretical
developments, the more troublesome articles in these volumes are either pitched
far too high for many readers or (as indicated at the outset) openly engage in
local theological and humanistic speculations written by and for “religionists”—as

Segal refers to this group of authors and readers in the introduction to his volume
(xiv). Such entries are out of place for a number of reasons: For one, they under-
mine the cross-cultural applicability of these essays, and it seems entirely arbi-
trary that we find no conservative or evangelical theological speculations in these
volumes—let alone equally context-specific theological topics found elsewhere in
the world. Somehow, these books’ editors seem to know that articles discussing,
say, the precise order of apocalyptic events or debating exactly how many kalpas
are yet to go in the current cycle of sanatana-dharma, are obviously out of bounds
in a religious studies handbook. Perhaps this is why there are no entries in any
of these volumes under “Sinners,” “Heathens,” or “Infidels,” let alone “Karma”
and “Jiva”—for these no less theologically local signifiers seem to make reference
to the wrong local. Thus the dangers of elevating but one local to the level of uni-
versal should now be apparent—it smuggles with it, and thereby legitimizes, the
preferences that led to choosing just this over just that local.
In planning his more specific volume on critical terms used in the study of
Buddhism, Lopez (2005) was more than aware of this issue; after listing a series of
Anglicized Asian technical terms from within Buddhist discourse (e.g., dharma,
karma, lama, sutra, etc.), followed by a selection of English terms that are often
used in descriptions and translations of Buddhism (e.g., compassion, emptiness,
insight, liberation, rebirth, and wisdom), his introduction states the following:
Neither of these types of terms has been included here, although both figure
importantly in the fifteen essays in this volume. To make Asian-language
terms the focus of the volume would run the risk of it becoming an
expanded glossary. . . . To make the English “Buddhist” terms the focus of
the volume would result in a similarly informational work, with the nor-
mative tradition, and especially its doctrine, largely determining the con-
tent of its chapters. (4–5)
Apart from (borrowing Clifford Geertz’s term) the experience-near term “Buddha”
(“near” at least when judged by the people studied by Buddhologists) in Lopez’s
opening essay, this book’s 14 other “critical terms” are all etic, experience-distant,
and thus higher-order concepts, such as “Art,” “Economy,” “Gift,” “History,”
“Practice,” and “Sex.” What is noteworthy about this is that, although such terms
are undoubtedly useful in the study of Buddhism, they are also useful in the study
of any other social movement; this indicates that the goal of Lopez’s volume is
not to authorize any one local, emic discourse but, instead, to see the study of
Buddhism as just one element of a larger study of things human. There is a differ-
ence, of course, between the study of a movement’s varied pasts and presents, as
well as its overlap with other social moments, on the one hand, and the effort to
authorize but one component of this movement as if it were natural and thus nor-
mative, on the other; unlike Quinn and Taliaferro’s philosophy of religion volume,
Lopez’s book clearly aims to avoid the latter.
So where we do find the inclusion of articles on local theological topics such
as, say, heaven and hell—as in Jeffrey Burton Russell’s chapter in The Blackwell
Companion to the Study of Religion (which is quite apart from Douglas Davies’s
essay on “Death and Afterlife” in the same volume) or Jonathan Kvanvig’s similar
article in the Blackwell philosophy of religion volume—their presence ought to
pique our curiosity. As might be guessed, we often find that they are written neither
in the tradition of a Religionswissenschaftler, who (in the case of the topics of heaven
and hell) would surely take the opportunity to survey different groups’ concep-
tions of their supposedly final destination (i.e., using the phenomenological and
comparative methods), nor in the voice of a conservative theologian, who would
probably elaborate on the actual characteristics of both places (if they thought such
places even existed) or itemize who might be heading to each. Although the latter
approach is, of course, ruled out of bounds in our field, Russell’s generalized char-
acterization of heaven as “being in enduring joy” and hell as “being in enduring
misery” nonetheless favors a more theologically liberal reading of these two signi-
fiers. For instance, he writes: “On a deep level they are eternalizations of the good
or evil characters that people form for themselves in this life” (271); heaven and
hell as mere metaphor? Not so for many of the people who employ these terms in
their daily discursive acts—why not adopt their viewpoint as if it is also the schol-
arly voice? As for Kvanvig’s chapter, it actually criticizes some people’s conceptions
of the afterlife as logically indefensible or not unified enough: “A better approach
[than positing the existence of limbo] . . . would be to address the defects in one’s
conception of hell than to introduce new and indefensible metaphysical dimen-
sions to the afterlife” (565; emphasis added). But whether it includes the liminal
state of limbo or not, could one not assert that the very conception of an afterlife
of any sort is defective inasmuch as it is founded upon “indefensible metaphysical
dimensions”? What is our point? On what basis can Kvanvig dismiss a particular
afterlife belief while still working to retain “a philosophically adequate conception
of heaven and hell” (568)?
So what is the moral of this little excursus on the afterlife? When it comes to
the frequent inclusion of normative theology within the academic study of reli-
gion, a generally unaddressed problem remains, one well known to the more
curious-minded Calvinist: Why do only some metaphysics get to count among
the elect?
Now, to be sure, there is a degree of arbitrariness in selecting any list of items, as
well as contributors, to be included in volumes such as these (though Blackwell’s,
Continuum’s, and Routledge’s books each exhibit their editors’ rationales for the
selections they’ve made rather transparently, with the first and last overlapping
considerably);14 therefore, editors are hardly to be criticized too strongly for includ-
ing or ruling out this or that term, or this or that author.15 Although, as already
evident from this very review, assessments of such comprehensive resources are
equally idiosyncratic, we happen to think that the rationale and implications for
the types of terms included—and the sort of work that the term does or does not
allow its user to do—do need to be addressed; if we follow Taylor, writing in the
introduction to Chicago’s Critical Terms volume, and understand any scholarly
field’s lexicon as “an enabling network of constraint” (17), then we should press
further to inquire into what sort of field these volumes enable—and, in doing so,
what is or is not being constrained?
Unlike the thematic organization of Blackwell’s Companion, Continuum’s
Guide, and Routledge’s Companion, the alphabetical order in Critical Terms for
Religious Studies seems to exhibit no one theoretical approach or rationale. Although
the volume, like all in this genre, is ostensibly unified by its authors’ concern to
study this thing called religion, across its essays readers will find a substantial dif-
ference of opinion as to just what aspects of the world fall within the scope of this
slippery designator. Lacking a unifying framework or shared conception of what is
or is not the object of study, the volume is—ironically, perhaps—a pretty accurate
depiction of the amorphous shape of the late-20th-and-early-21st-century field.
In contradistinction to the three essays from this volume discussed earlier (i.e.,
Smith, Sharf, and Lopez), consider its essay “God” by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
and Gordon Kaufman; according to them, the “wide range of approaches” that
characterize the modern study of God are historical, psychological, sociological,
anthropological, linguistic, comparative, feminist, ethical, aesthetic, philosophi-
cal, and theological (154). Setting aside the already mentioned problem of deter-
mining whose theology gets to count as theology (today, theology on the “wrong”
topics ends up being classified as either radical politics or fanatical ideology16),
might one not inquire whether the last few items in their list constitute instances
of data for the first few in their list?
This “come one, come all” view of the field—which often goes by the name of
inter- or cross-disciplinarity—has long persisted, likely because it so efficiently
allows deeply committed religious liberal, as well as liberal humanistic, scholars
who are alienated from more doctrinaire institutional settings to describe, com-
pare, sometimes criticize, but more often celebrate such things as myths, sym-
bols, rituals, experiences, justice, and truth, all the while conceiving of each as just
the tips of deeply submerged and significant icebergs of panhuman, transhistori-
cal meaning. The trouble here is that too often the still popular cross-disciplinary
effort seems driven by the assumption that the object of study pre-exists or tran-
scends the tools used to study it, thereby preventing one from reducing—as the
old saying goes—religion to any of its supposed constituent parts. This debate
over reductionism has hardly been settled but, at least for the past few decades,
the détente that has been reached between theologians and humanists, on the one
hand, and social scientists, on the other, goes by the name of cross-disciplinarity.
But, as Hans Penner and Edward Yonan argued 40 years ago in a now classic
article, this big-tent view makes no sense “because the use of different tools pre-
supposes the formulation of different tasks that often lead to a basic contradiction
in understanding the field” (1972: 109). Rephrased, we could say that different
methods accomplish different tasks, are used in different institutional settings,
and (or so we would argue, pressing Penner and Yonan further than they might
have intended) constitute different theoretical items as objects of study—which
suggests just why it is so problematic to assume, as Segal apparently does (in a
previously quoted line from his introduction), that methods as varied as sociologi-
cal and theological have all “contributed to the understanding of the phenomenon
of religion.” Put simply, there may be no such thing as a transmethodological
phenomenon (a surprising, but possibly rather telling, technical term Segal uses)
that predates the differences in the tools that we all use and the interests that drive
their use. Yet glossing over just those differences may prove very useful, as in
the previously mentioned essay “God,” in which the authors repeat that they are
interested in sorting out the “nuances and complexities of meaning that are intri-
cately bound up in” the symbol “God” (154; emphasis added). The problem here is
that one is never really sure whether the authors are simply talking descriptively
about the diverse uses of a particular sociolinguistic device (i.e., “G-o-d”) or, like
the already cited author of the article on heaven and hell, normatively judging the
adequacy of “the images and metaphors used to express the divine” (149; emphasis
added). Taking the widespread belief in what Schüssler Fiorenza and Kaufman
aptly name “expressing the divine” (the difference between this idealist phrasing
and what we could imagine coming from someone in the Smith-Sharf-Lopez
tradition—opting instead for, perhaps, constituting or concocting—is significant)
as simply given, they are therefore content with chronicling the many different
conceptions of God (and it is just these many differences that add up to the “com-
plex” part), though mainly in Judaism and Christianity—although there are two
full paragraphs toward the end devoted to the relation between “God” and what
we might as well term other people’s “gods.” It comes as no surprise, then, that
explaining the fact of these sorts of beliefs has no place in the study of religion
as exemplified in this particular essay; as the phenomenologist might have once
phrased it, the essence is an intangible given, and our interest therefore involves
chronicling the different ways in which it presents itself.
It appears, then, that repeatedly asserting that the topic of “God” is complex
and then listing in great detail the varied ways in which a monotheistic being is
envisioned misses the point of the academic study of religion. In fact, although
it is surely not intended by these authors, their rhetorical use of “complex” is
rather reminiscent of the notion of “irreducible complexity” in intelligent design
discourses, because in both cases it nicely undermines naturalistic explanatory

attempts.17 However, should one adopt the position advocated by the field’s increas-
ingly influential cognitive theorists, then belief in immaterial beings who possess
traits other than those that we normally associate with physical beings is indeed a
highly complex topic, but—and here’s the key difference—its underlying causes are
not too complex to explain satisfactorily (e.g., Pascal Boyer’s thoughts on just how
memorable are slightly counterintuitive ideas about agents). Sadly, the essay’s
hermeneutical emphasis on what this or that religious topic means constrains the
field considerably by excluding any and all such explanatory work.
Unlike some who understand the study of religion as exhibiting a
cross-disciplinary character in which theology appears as a viable method for study-
ing religion in the public university (as increasingly exemplified in the American
Academy of Religion’s own structure and content, where “theology and religious
studies” [emphasis added] has somehow become the normalized rubric over the
past decade), we agree with Penner and Yonan: This “the more the merrier” posi-
tion is symptomatic of a deep confusion that apparently still exists, a confusion as
to which human institutions offer tools and, depending on which tools one uses,
what will comprise one’s data. Unfortunately, this cross-disciplinary attitude is
apparent in several of the handbooks, such as the Chicago volume’s introduction
where, in the first few pages, we learn a number of things about religion (e.g., the
“it” that we name “religion” doesn’t disappear even when it seems absent; there is
now a resurgence of religious belief; religion has something to do with spiritual
concerns; it is a tool of resistance against hegemonic forces; it has something to do
with the individual’s private interiority), only then to be told on page six that “there
happens to be little consensus about precisely what religion is and how it can
best be studied.” There is a carnivalesque side to this introduction, not because
of some Bakhtinian sophistication, but because the old carnie game of bait and
switch is being played: First you see religion under one shell and then, after some
deft sleight of hand, it disappears altogether.
But Taylor is not alone in playing this game; although we would not have
expected it, we find a related attitude in both Segal’s and Hinnells’s introductions,
respectively: “[N]one of the approaches is likely to exhaust the subject” (xvii) and
“Religions might be compared to diamonds; they have many facets; they can be
seen from many angles, but the pictures are too complex for any one writer to see
the whole” (19). These statements suggest just this sort of disappearing realism,
as if the things we group together and classify as religion are self-evidently related
to each other in the natural world but prove elusive when it comes to our various
approaches to their study. We are reminded here of the old Sunday-school story
of the four witnesses all watching the same traffic accident from four different
corners of the same intersection. The moral of the tale is that none of their per-
spectives can exhaust the actual event, available only to the omniscient narrative
necessarily floating outside all viewpoints, because they each saw only a part, and
all we have is the parts that they saw. As useful as this may be for teaching a spe-
cific theological view of the relationships among the Synoptic Gospels (we have
long heard this story used in much the same fashion as the three-leaf clover is
used to illustrate the doctrine of the trinity), we are not sure that a naïve realism
that posits a god’s-eye view, where there is such a thing as the whole (a.k.a. “the big
picture,” “what really happened,” and “closure”), is all that useful in an academic
study of religion that takes history (i.e., contingency) seriously.
Instead of drawing the reader’s attention to such rhetorical sleights of hand,
these introductions keep the reader’s gaze firmly on the object that apparently
isn’t really there, despite being everywhere. We are all scholars of religion, readers
are told, but we can’t agree as to what we actually study. (Hence the alphabeti-
cal organization of Chicago’s volume seems to be a pretty reasonable response,
indicative of its understanding of the field.) In what other field would this lack
of consensus be a selling point? Where else could one be told—within a page of
Taylor recounting the importance of Jonathan Z. Smith’s insight that the taxon
“religion” is an invented scholarly tool that does not have a one-to-one correspon-
dence to something in the real world, and soon after his positive reference to
Bruce Lincoln’s work on how religious discourses authorize disputes over every-
day material resources—that
[w]hen religion is explained in terms of nonreligious factors . . . the verac-

ity of religion is called into question. . . . For many individuals who remain
personally committed to religious belief and practice, the insistence that
the origins and causes of religion are nonreligious involves a pernicious
reductionism that must be steadfastly resisted. (Taylor 1998a: 10)
In the midst of informing readers of Smith’s and Lincoln’s work, their editor gives
the impression of unauthorizing it by going on to describe how some of the people
studied by such methods find it to be troublesome; no doubt many of the people
studied by scholars find scholarly redescriptions of their lives to be incorrect,
harmful, and perhaps even insidious. But what is not clear in Taylor’s text is just
why such judgments are of relevance to the scholar.18 Juxtaposing these two view-
points, as if participant claims are self-evidently relevant to assessing the scholarly
merit of an argument, takes away with one hand what was given by the other (i.e.,
positive assessments of Smith and Lincoln’s work).
Something akin to this is also apparent in Hinnells’s introduction to The
Routledge Companion; after acknowledging that “[m]any scholars have questioned
whether there is any such ‘thing’ as religion,” suggesting that there may only be
religions,19 he presses the case further by briefly highlighting the fact that “some
have gone further and questioned the value of the term ‘religion’”—though readers
do not learn why such questioning has taken place. Such unelaborated critiques
of the category “religion” notwithstanding, he then informs his readers “that the
word ‘religion’ is useful, but should be used with caution” (2)—or, as he phrases
it not long after, “[a]ll ‘labels’ have limitations and those must be accepted, so
‘religion’ is a useful but potentially misleading term” (7). But if such fundamental
criticisms of our primary categorical tool are worth mentioning, are such critiques
(see especially chapters 1 and 7) not worth considering in detail? Moreover, why
might we conclude that this possibly flawed and misleading term still remains
useful? In fact, given that utility is a relational concept, we really ought to ask:
“To whom is it useful and for what purpose?” In other words, if the criticisms are
worth considering, then some persuasive justification for the assertion of contin-
ued utility would be rather helpful; without elaborating on the limitations, readers
have no idea what sort of caution should attend this term’s usage.
To be fair, Hinnells’s own opening chapter, “Why Study Religions?,”20 more
than likely ought to be consulted on such substantive issues, for there is only so
much that an editor can accomplish in a brief introduction. But, despite a section
near the opening entitled “Defining Religion,” its readers are, sadly, no further
ahead. Although they learn once again that “there is no such thing as ‘religion,’
there are only religions, i.e., people who identify themselves as members of a
religious group, Christians, Muslims, etc.” (6), they are no closer to finding out
what it is about such things as Christianity and Islam that naturally makes them
members of the same class of objects. We do get a little closer when we learn that
“[t]o understand a religion, it is essential to have an awareness of the different
sets of values, ideals, customs and ethical values” (9)—but what is the relation-
ship between these things we’re grouping together as religions and those things
that soon after are called “principles, values, and ideals” and later termed “values,
ideals, and priorities” (19)? To pick but two possible answers—answers that each
take us down very different investigative paths—do these institutions create and
embody them, or do they merely authorize values that pre-exist them, by “clothing
these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations
seem uniquely realistic”—as Geertz so famously put it in his now-classic essay
“Religion as a Cultural System” (1966: 4). Are religions all about their content and
meanings (as most scholarship on religion seems to assume), or is the content
arbitrary and the form and structure what really matter?
Now, if Taylor and Hinnells were simply describing the way others study reli-
gion—if Taylor’s comments on “pernicious reductionism” were simply an account
of how some others feel, and if Hinnells’s lack of elaboration was an example of
how others get around the usual scholarly requirements of argumentation and
evidence—then their introductions would be helpful descriptions of the current
antitheoretical atmosphere in which scholars of religion do their work. But this
does not seem to be the case, because the reader learns from Taylor not only that
“[c]ritics of theology often embrace the methods of social sciences . . . with an

enthusiasm bordering on the religious,” but also that an emphasis on method and
theory is merely an attempt to replace theology with methodology as the queen
of the sciences. As for Hinnells, after informing his readers that “[t]here is no
‘right’ way to study religions” (2–3), he asserts that there nonetheless happens to
be a wrong way, what he calls dogmatism, which, he informs his readers, does
not appear in his volume. However, lacking any elaboration for what dogmatism
signifies and why the proposed right way ought to be considered correct, this ban
seems, well, dogmatic.
So what is the message to the readers of these two introductions? It is that
the theologian and the scholar of religion are colleagues toiling in the same field.
While we are certainly not persuaded of this, one must admit that the Routledge
introduction (perhaps unintentionally) does seem to constitute but one piece of
evidence in favor of Taylor’s position, because although it seems acceptable for
scholars to dogmatically assert “religion” to be self-evidently useful (we have no
need to elaborate on why it is useful, despite recognizing criticisms of it), other
people’s stated self-evidencies are understood as dogmatic and thus unjustifiable.
Apparently we are all doing the same thing.
But shouldn’t scholarship constitute something other than dogmatic assertion?
In the undefended assumption, no less than in the undisclosed preferences that
elevate one local to the status of universal, there reside several issues deserving of
further study. For example, recalling Hinnells’s continued use of “religion” despite
his recognition of an ill-defined problem with the category, consider one of the
articles in Blackwell’s companion to philosophy of religion. There, in an essay
entitled “African Religions from a Philosophical Point of View,” Kwasi Wiredu
informs readers of the following:
Not only is the word “religion” not an African word . . . —but also . . . it is
doubtful whether there is a single-word or even periphrastic translation of
the word in any African language. This does not mean, of course, that the
phenomenon itself does not exist among Africans. One might have some-
thing without being given to talking about it. (34)
There may be no more succinct example of the widespread failure of historical

consciousness among contemporary scholars—what we have already termed the
old “bait and switch.” While acknowledging that the word “religion” is a contin-
gent element introduced into a social world from outside, the concept (or, as we
once used to say, the phenomenon to which the term supposedly points, thereby
signaling a specific sort of metaphysic) has no such history, because it somehow
predates language and culture (more evidence of what our volume’s introduction
termed religiosity before the concept religion). Interestingly, we see much of the
same equivocation in Hinnells’s own opening essay, “Why Study Religions?,” in

which readers learn that there are indeed groups of people whose languages do
not have the term (his example is ancient Sanskrit [7], although we’d hazard a
guess that, taking far more seriously the Latin roots of “religion” and the history of
its spread on the coattails of colonial administrators, we could multiply examples
considerably21), as well as groups for whom “a modern West-imposed label” is
little more than anachronistic (his example here is naming “a plethora of differ-
ent groups, beliefs, and practices across a large continent” as all being one thing,
“Hinduism” [7]). Nonetheless, the rule of thumb for defining religion is that
[a]n act or thought is religious when the person concerned thinks they
are practicing their “religion.” Organizations are religious when the
people involved think they are functioning religiously. . . . An act is a reli-
gious act when the person involved believes it to be associated with their
religion. (6–7)
Although this dereference for so-called indigenous naming practices seems, at

first glance, to avoid the imperialism of using “our” term to name “them,” upon
closer examination it is evident that all this strategy does is to dodge the problem.
If not everyone has the concept of “religion,” then they are hardly using “religion”
when they engage in acts of self-designation. Some have posited that “they” are
therefore not naturally thinking that they are functioning religiously or that certain
of their beliefs, behaviors, and institutions have an inherent link that separates
them from other beliefs, behaviors, and institutions in their social world—at least
these particular linkages are not made until they are told that they are being reli-
gious by someone already armed with the concept and the means to distinguish
it from other designators (e.g., culture, politics, etc.). Only those whose languages
and cultures have been directly affected by ancient Latin language and culture,
along with those who have over the past few centuries become accustomed to this
category by means of their (in most cases, uninvited) political, economic, and mili-
tary contact first with Europe and now North America, will spontaneously think
themselves into being religious. Thus, despite the possible good intention that
drives Hinnells’s criterion, taking other’s people’s word for it efficiently natural-
izes a category that is hardly found in nature. In fact, there may be some benefit to
resurrecting the 18th-century term “natural religion,” but retooling it to name this
now-popular position that posits an authentically religious, prediscursive senti-
ment that nonetheless predates its naming as religion.
It therefore seems that such scholars assume the existence of an
extra-discursive, Platonic realm that enables them to (1) acknowledge the historicity
of the term “religion” while still (2) concluding that those who do not possess the
word are nonetheless “pre-eminently religious, not even knowing how to live without
religion” (as Wiredu phrases it in his article on African religions). That the scholarly
category “religion,” once used as a local European indicator of an ever-changing
sense of social affinity/distance with newly encountered peoples (a point argued
persuasively by Chidester [1996]), took off so successfully outside of Europe’s aca-
demic hallways—such that today we cannot help but find people worldwide using it
as a preferred self-designator for some supposedly authentic, indigenous essence—
is precisely what ought to be attracting our interest, and what the editors of these
handbooks ought to be bringing to their readers’ attention. Just because the English
language, the U.S. dollar (for the time being, at least), the use of longitude and lati-
tude (as discussed in chapter 1 to McCutcheon 2007c), and the Gregorian calendar
are now found worldwide does not mean that they are neutral or naturally occurring
global systems of signification; so it goes with the taxon “religion” too.
Taking this point to heart, we might say that, rather than studying the spread
of religions, perhaps we ought to consider studying why naming part of the social
world as religion has caught on so widely among diverse human communities,
each with their own prior systems of self-designation, in just the past few hundred
years. The difference in these two research projects is significant and amounts to
the difference between, say, Tomoko Masuzawa’s (a contributor to both the Chicago
and Continuum volumes) genealogical effort to trace the 18th-and-19th-century
development of the concept of “world religions” (2005), on the one hand, and
Stephen Prothero’s (2007) widely publicized call for Americans (more accurately
we should say Christian Americans22) to simply get on with the business of bet-
ter using this classification in creating knowledge about the place of themselves
and others in the contemporary geopolitical world, on the other.23 Unfortunately,
Prothero seems either uninterested in, or unaware of, the fact that this now com-
monplace category was not always taken for granted, as it was originally derived
from the German Weltreligionen—meaning that a small number of religions were
judged by late 19th-century scholars to have transcended their merely local, ethnic,
or national origins (i.e., Landesreligionen), making them truly “world class,” if you
will (see Masuzawa 2005: 107 ff.). It is therefore no coincidence that the German
forms of Christianity with which those scholars were familiar—and which were
understood as a faith (Glaube) that had long outgrown its local and thus lim-
ited origins in ancient Palestine—were the prototype for this classification (with
Buddhism initially being the only other undisputed occupant of this category).
Accordingly, those who toiled in colonialism’s intellectual workshops developed
“world religions” to distinguish and thereby rank “us” over some posited “them”
who were unable to do as we apparently did.
But for those with an interest in such historical matters, the development and
continued popularity of the “world religions” concept constitutes a case study in
how power and identity are negotiated by means of classification. In support of
this thesis, we might consider how, in The Routledge Companion to the Study of
Religion (439–440), the once-popular, but long-since-discredited categories of

“universal (or universalizing) religions” versus “ethnic (or cultural) religions” (a
subtype of which is “tribal [or traditional] religions”) are surprisingly revived in
an essay on “Religion and Geography”—as if this 19th-century way of dividing
up the pie was a self-evidently useful descriptor of actual states of affairs.24 That
the author admits from the outset that—much as with those who used these very
categories centuries ago—his essay has “a particular emphasis on Christianity”
(439; evidence of which is found in his recommendation that “[t]he most useful
collection of statistics on contemporary religious distribution” is David Barrett’s
World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the
Modern World, ad 1900–2000 [1982; 2001]) provides persuasive evidence that the
link between discourses on, and typologies of, “world religions,” on the one hand,
and assertions of identity and power, on the other, are hardly to be found only in
the colonial past (perhaps prompting us to reconsider Prothero’s prescription for
the religious illiteracy problem that he diagnoses among Americans). The World
Christian Encyclopedia’s “comprehensive survey of the branches of Christianity”
turns out, upon further examination, to be a thinly veiled attempt to overcome
potentially dangerous fragmentation and difference within the seemingly uniform
“Church,” to ensure that a picture of “the faith” emerges in which “diversity . . . is
not divisiveness” and “global Christianity emerges as a single whole, even as the
Body of Christ” (1982: v; reproduced in the second edition). This ought to alert
readers to the political goal of a resource that underlies an essay on the seemingly
benign topic of “Religion and Geography.”
Sticking with the study of Christianity for the moment, a useful example of the
manner in which terminology and classification betray prior interests is also evi-
dent in another volume, John Hinnells’s A Handbook of Ancient Religions (2007).
Before turning to its table of contents, readers might justifiably wonder about
what is included in such a volume, given that antiquity provides an awfully large
pool from which to select one’s topics (i.e., we need some way of governing the
unregulated economy of the past). One criterion used in this volume is the inclu-
sion of religions that continue to exist versus those that do not, which helps to
account for why there is a chapter on such things as ancient Egypt and the civili-
zations of the Aztecs and the Incas. However, this criterion—which distinguishes
between living and, one supposes, dead religions—does not help to explain all
of the choices that were made because, as we learn from Hinnells’s introduc-
tion, “[a]lthough Judaism is a living religion it was decided to include ancient
Israel, in part because of the link with other ancient Near Eastern civilizations”
(6). Although other religions that are alive and kicking, such as Confucianism,
also occupy a place in some of the other essays (as in the chapter devoted to “The
Religions of Ancient China”)—indicating, presumably, the manner in which these
seemingly uniform modern traditions actually change significantly over time and
place (hence the common habit of distinguishing priestly, temple-based “ancient

Israelite religion” from rabbinic, synagogue-based “Judaism”)—Christianity (or
what we might call early Christianity) somehow eludes this criterion. A tradi-
tion that might accurately be understood as a social movement of antiquity—a
religion of the Hellenistic era that was born and rose to initial prominence in the
Roman empire—is certainly not considered a Roman religion in this volume.
Instead, although Christianity is mentioned periodically throughout the chapter
on “Religions in the Roman Empire,” its historical origins are left unexplored
and therefore seem to lie outside the world of the Roman Empire; instead, the
chapter is concerned with so-called pre-Christian trends within that thing we
today know as paganism—a term the author, J. A. North, admittedly laments
using, because, as readers learn in a footnote, “the term . . . was apparently used
by the early Christians as an unfriendly term for those who had persisted in the
old pre-Christian religious ways” (360). Despite making plain that the designator
was polemical from the outset, the author somehow goes on to suggest that “the
word ‘pagan’ . . . has become a pejorative term for religions of which the speaker
disapproves” (emphasis added). Although its replacement “would be desirable,”
none is proposed, and “pagan” is used throughout the article.
The reason for not replacing such an apparently polemical term is difficult,
though not impossible, to imagine. Given the manner in which early Christianity,
which, historically speaking, is coextensive with other social movements included
in the volume, is not investigated in any real detail suggests to me that there is
an implicit assumption that the thing we call Christianity either has no history
or at least not the sort of history that other mass social movements have (i.e.,
perhaps Christianity has the sort of history that a Hegelian Geist might, as it is
incrementally realized in history). It is just this sort of an exceptionalism that is
evident in such seemingly inconsequential asides as “Christianity emerged into the
awareness of pagans as a variant version of Judaism . . .” (357; emphasis added)—
the use of the passive voice is important here, we think, for it is hard to imagine
many other social formations whose earliest phase could be adequately theorized
as merely “emerging”—especially social movements with which the writer is in
disagreement, for in that case their very existence would more than likely have to
be accounted for in detail. Rather, much as we recall Jonathan Z. Smith at a confer-
ence once drawing on Edward Said’s useful distinction between the metaphysics
of origins discourses and the historicist underpinnings of discourses on begin-
nings (Said 2004), we may see here the tip of a sui generis origins argument, in
which some independently “arising” Christianity, some semi-autonomous social
movement that originates of its own volition, simply happened to people (i.e., pas-
sively emerging into their minds and thereby their lives), rather than a historical
movement that was a happening of people (who have bodies and desires and not
just minds). If this is the case, if this is the assumption that protects Christianity
from inclusion in this volume as but one more religion in the ancient world that
somehow survives to this day (is this not one of the assumptions that has long
kept the study of early Christianity from constituting a subfield of classics depart-
ments?), then it would be rather difficult—because it undermines the case for
exceptionalism—to give up one of the rhetorical means by which members of this
early movement naturalized the distinctions they perceived between themselves
and their peers (i.e., placing their social competitors on the margins by terming
them “pagan”).
But even replacing the term “pagan” with a term more palatable to contem-
porary tastes would accomplish little, as the issue is not the name or even its
condescending jab at the unsophisticated country bumpkins who lived on the
urban outskirts (i.e., the Latin paganus refers to the inhabitants of the pagus, the
rural country district).25 No, the issue is not the term but, instead, the discursive
boundaries authorized and continually policed by such things as this term—
and, along with it, a whole series of interconnected social habits and networks,
as well as institutional arrangements—things that, after long periods of time,
have made it not just possible, but natural and even desirable to conceptualize
this group as uniformly pagan and that group as distinctively Christian, as if their
identities refer to internal traits of enduring value that can be tracked across his-
tory. Replacing “pagan” with some other term leaves this supposed naturalness
untheorized—much as replacing the onetime common designator “Negro” with
“Colored,” “Black,” and now “African-American” does nothing to theorize why it is
so common to categorize, within the US at least, human beings based on such an
arbitrary (yet portrayed as natural and self-evident) feature as the pigment in our
skin. Instead, such terminological updates efficiently reauthorize this realism and
naturalism, inasmuch as we all apparently know that there is some sort of deeply
significant difference out there in the world that ought to be named; but this note-
worthy difference could itself be understood as the result of the naming itself
(and the social interests encoded in the name, motivating the need for a name) in
the first place. As an example, consider the manner in which some authors who
critique the term “religion” somehow still end up studying Hindusim, Buddhism,
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, Shinto, etc.—as if these things all
have some essentially shared trait that demands that they be organized as a coher-
ent family, regardless of what we call them. Such an approach to naming fails to
take seriously the link between our classifications, or interests, and our ability to
imagine the world as being arranged in this or that manner.26
All this is merely to say what Jonathan Z. Smith said so plainly 30 years ago:
Self-consciousness about our use of classifications, concepts, and categories
ought to comprise a scholar’s primary expertise (1982: xi), because the knowledge
we gain from putting the words in these handbooks into practice is premised on
the assumption that only one culture’s folk category (i.e., the Latin-based term
“religion”) can be effortlessly elevated to the status of a cross-cultural universal,

thereby naming an essential feature of all humankind. Now, of course, using
some local as if it were universal and doing so for our analytic purposes, to satisfy
our own curiosities and our interests, is the inevitable situation in which we, as
scholars, find ourselves, inasmuch as we, like everyone else, are situated human
beings with no choice but to grapple with issues of familiarity and strangeness,
similarity and difference, nearness and distance, etc., by means of the tools that
are at hand. However, doing so because of our confidence in the universal reach
of these purposes, curiosities, and interests—thereby assuming that, as previ-
ously phrased by Wiredu, “[o]ne might have something without being given to
talking about it”—is, at least to our way of thinking, best understood as that form
of ideology that might better go by the name of imperialism. And we think that
we can find this in the work of those 19th-century predecessors, whom we today
so easily criticize for their imperialist work, just as much as we do in the work of
those today who strive to recover the timeless authentic that we just happen to
call “religion.”
If we see such attempts to study religion as if the term named something
real behind its manifestation as nothing more or less than thinly disguised
criticisms of treating some human beliefs, behaviors, and institutions as thor-
oughly human doings, then we would not be surprised to read Taylor, writing in
the introduction to the Chicago volume: “In order to appreciate the richness and
complexity of religious life, it is necessary to deploy a variety of interpretive strat-
egies” (13; emphasis added). To our way of thinking, such a study of religion has
little to do with explaining forms of human behavior (including our ability to
concoct and reproduce systems of signification in the first place); instead, we are
here to appreciate, understand (no doubt in the old sense of Verstehen), maybe
celebrate, and always interpret this disembodied thing that we call meaning or
value—that rich yet elusive ahistoric quality that dances unimpeded through-
out history and culture, and which, somewhat akin to Eliade’s new humanism,
apparently falls squarely into the lap of the careful historian of religions. Given
this rather traditional hermeneutical emphasis, there is little surprise, then,
that some essays in these handbooks fail to distinguish between those phenom-
enological, or descriptive, categories of significance only to some indigenous
maps of the world and those second-order, self-consciously comparative and
explanatory categories that are significant to a group of scholars who study all
forms of human behavior as equally mundane (though nonetheless interesting)
historical events.
Unless we are terribly mistaken, the lack of self-consciousness that leads to
conflating these two otherwise distinct levels of cognitive and social activity is char-
acteristic of a previous generation’s phenomenological handbooks. There is there-
fore a deep irony in evidence in some of our field’s newer resources: Everything
old certainly seems to be new again—an irony that reminds us of Eva Knodt’s
critique of Taylor’s co-written work on media technology (see Taylor and Saarinen
1994); according to her, the sort of critique that many scholars have recently
brought to our field “feeds off precisely the nostalgia for a waning literary culture
to which it wants to serve as an antidote” (1995: x). Despite some truly important
individual essays in these collections, when taken as a whole, the handbook genre
seems to suggest that, aside from the many advances in the field in these past two
generations, before and behind our many words, there is still something mysteri-
ous that lurks just out of eyesight and therefore eludes our grasp (and thus our
cross-disciplinary methods). Whether we call it power, the holy, or the sacred—as
did our intellectual predecessors—or faith, belief, experience, principle, ideals,
meaning, or value—as do many of our contemporaries—in the end, C’est la même
chose. Just as with the book read by that Danish prince, whose words we bor-
rowed for this chapter’s title—in which the satirical rogue repeats self-evidencies
when saying that old men have grey beards (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II)—many of
our handbooks merely paraphrase commonplaces that we already know. But since
these handbooks’ proposals are aimed at publishers (to get authors into print and
thereby advance their careers), and the products of these proposals are aimed at
classrooms (to account for sales), then perhaps such repetition is strategic; just as
with comedy, one must never alienate one’s audience. In fact, it is an old adage
of advertising. Don Draper (as played by Jon Hamm), a 1960 New York advertis-
ing executive and the protagonist of the recent AMC television series Mad Men,
put it this way: “Advertising is all about making people happy. And you do that by
making them feel that what they happen to think, what they happen to be doing,
is what they ought to be thinking, ought to be doing. That whatever you’re doing,
you are OK.”
The descriptive knowledge that we gain from some of the articles in these
handbooks amounts to just that, because we learn that behind all of our contin-
gent terminology and petty methodological disputes, there is some necessary and
universal thing that none of us can fully put into words, for the diamonds that we
study have far too many facets to be seen by just one set of squinting eyes, and
that four witnesses hardly exhaust what actually happened in Roman Palestine.
No doubt, confirmation that such a firm foundation lies behind the world’s com-
peting appearances is quite comforting. If so, then quoting Wittgenstein, as does
Lopez near the end of his essay “Belief”—when Wittgenstein writes that “the
expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence . . . and the sentence has sense
only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus”
(1965: 42)—turns out to be more than just a little unnerving; for now the “thing”
that we can’t quite put into words is not an inner feeling, faith, value, or experi-
ence but simply a word. In fact, all we may have are words, sentences, language,
systems of signifiers, sets of rules, structures, all of our own making, all of which
have a past and a limited shelf life (both of which are entailed in Said’s term
“beginnings”). If, as scholars and teachers, we are doing something other than
paraphrasing what our students already think they know, then maybe this is pre-
cisely the sort of disquieting news that we ought to be pressing in our research
and classes, prompting both our readers and students to be curious about what
people do in those contingent situations that we call social life. If so, then it might
be possible to look anew at both what we study in our classes and what we write
in our books, seeing them all not as the products of an intangible faith, the sites
where the sacred manifests itself, or the spot where timeless principles and val-
ues are expressed, but instead as the results of all too tangible human actions and
thus the ordinary residue of inventive but nonetheless contrived human institu-
tions and situations.
Now, those would be words worth reading.
3
Contemporary Reinventions of
Religion: Disney and the Academy
previous chapters have sketched out a claim that “religion” as a category is,
essentially, a modern discursive invention, intimately related to politics and other
social forces. The following observations aim to sharpen this suggestion in two
ways by looking at the popular cultural phenomenon that is Disney World. One of
these claims will be familiar from chapter 1, namely that the distinction between
religion and nonreligious aspects of culture is completely arbitrary, that, in fact,
aspects of culture denied the designation of religion function in essentially identi-
cal ways to those accorded the label. The other claim is equally important: The
discourse around Disney World and the way it serves ends nearly identical to those
of the discourse around religion show that the invention or manufacture of reli-
gion is not something that happened one day in the 1600s (or 1300s, or 1500s, or
1700s), and that forever haunts us. The tradition of all the dead generations may
indeed weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living (Marx 1978c: 595), but in
this case, the living are complicit. Religion is manufactured over and over again
in the modern and even postmodern West. As chapter 4 shows, the sociopolitical
functions of creating and defining the category of “religion” are continually active.
The demarcation and segregation of religion are not merely relics inherited from
the past.
The choice of Disney World as the target of these observations is motivated
by the odd and ironic decision to hold the 1998 American Academy of Religion/
Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL) annual conference in Orlando, Florida,
on the Disney World grounds. This bizarre juxtaposition of high-end scholarly
posturing (i.e., an academic conference) with resort-style “family” entertainment
provided us, as scholars of religion, with a particularly fruitful occasion to con-
sider—or reconsider—what, precisely, religion is: what it is that we think we study
and how we conceive of it. One could understand the choice of this pop-culture
venue as a tacit admission that our field is academically bankrupt in a variety of
different ways. For instance, it could be argued that our organization’s attraction
to Disney World, with its various cultic and utopic features, is indicative of the
theological, or “pro-religious,” bias of the field of religious studies. (That these
major scholarly conferences have never met in Las Vegas—“Sin City” being a
well-known and usually affordable conference venue—may provide evidence for
the same conclusion.) Or again, perhaps, this venue may reveal a disposition to
participate unreflectively and even ignorantly in “religious” behaviors to an extent
that ill-befits our self-perception as students of religion. But these considerations,
right or wrong, straightaway prompt the much more interesting questions of
whether, how, and on what grounds Disney World, and indeed the whole range of
Disney-related phenomena, might be compared to our purported object of study,
“religion.”1
In what follows—inspired by the 1998 AAR/SBL conference’s strange and
suggestive juxtaposition of the AAR with Disney World—we attempt to pursue
this comparison for the light it sheds on the issue of defining religion and, con-
versely, for the light that religion, as a category, may shed on the prominence
of Disney and Disney World in popular culture. Our initial assertion is a rela-
tively straightforward one: that the primary cultural and social effect of both the
self-presentation of Disney World and the perception/representation of certain
otherwise mundane social practices and institutions as religion is to privatize, to
ensure the individualistic seclusion of, positive value claims. By “positive” we mean
something very particular: the assertion that any particular object or behavior has
intrinsic value. This is opposed to “negative” value claims or, as below, “negative”
morality, which simply insist on the importance of respecting the positive value
claims of others. For instance, the desire to have an expensive car is a positive
value, whereas the belief that anyone who wishes to have an expensive car ought
to be able to pursue that wish is a negative value. The privatization of positive
value therefore simply means that, although it may be perfectly acceptable for
one to value having an expensive car, it would not occur to them to assume that all
people should and must have, or even desire to have, expensive cars. The opera-
tive moral imperative here, in fact, is precisely the opposite, negative one—just
because one desires such a car does not mean that anyone else should or must
share that desire for themselves.2 In short, then, modern capitalism and its atten-
dant liberal political ideology tend to restrict moral imperatives and assertions
about the value of various goals to the very circumscribed realm of “individual
choice.”3 Both the self-presentation of Disney World and the categorization of
certain behaviors as “religious” support this distinctively modern individualiza-
tion of desire, ultimacy, and positive morality.
Unfortunately, such a thesis is substantially complicated by the fact that it
invokes “modernity,” a category certainly used throughout the other chapters but
one whose durability or even current applicability is sometimes no longer to be
taken for granted. Modernity—understood as a general sociopolitical condition
Contemporary Reinventions of Religion: Disney and the Academy 59
with attendant ideological or cultural manifestations4—has, in its various forms,

come under attack in recent decades as outmoded, surpassed, unworkable, and
otiose. Modernity has, at least according to some cultural critics, come to be
replaced or at least challenged by an entity known as “postmodernity,” whether
this be viewed as a general sociocultural condition or, more superficially, as a set
of new hermeneutical assumptions.5 As at least some critics see this new post-
modernity as generating all kinds of dramatic shifts in behavior and sensibility,
including forcing a revision of the way religion is perceived or even providing
for a revivification of religious belief and practice (see, e.g., Derrida 1998; Taylor
1998b: 53), “modernity” may no longer be the best heuristic for conceptualizing
a comparison between the self-presentations of religion and Disney World. Thus,
in what follows, we have arranged our observations according to a typology in
which modernity (understood as a broad social condition giving rise to various
distinctive cultural and intellectual patterns) gives way to postmodernity (similarly
understood). The self-presentation and sociocultural effects of both the category of
“religion” and the cultural products associated with Disney may be in the process
of undergoing a shift.
Modernity, Religion, and the Exclusion of Desire

The easiest part of all this to explore concerns the very basic hypothesis—as articu-
lated throughout this volume and as addressed by Talal Asad (1993, 2003) and oth-
ers—that there really is no such thing as religion, in the world. Of course, this may
be said of any taxon, but in the case of “religion,” the formulation of the category
has more to do with the normative interests of modernity than with the intellectual
or theoretical motives of students of religion.6 “Religion” is an artificial agglomera-
tion of specific social behaviors, whose basis of distinction from other social behav-
iors is a function of the specific characteristics of modernity. In particular, political
modernity, the foundation of the nation-state in the shadow of the Enlightenment,
is predicated on negativity in its organization and self-understanding. That is to
say, the state as conceived by modernity serves the purpose of creating a frame-
work in which the individuals who are imagined to constitute the state (i.e., citi-
zens) are best poised to pursue and create their own meanings, to be free from
the aggression of others so that they may seek and realize whatever it is they may
regard to be their own particular, selfish self-interest. Thus, the (negative) role of
the state is to proscribe means (i.e., if and to the extent that those means interfere
with the desultory self-realizations of others), rather than to prescribe ends (which
would represent a positive orientation).7 And the question of meaning, the specifi-
cation and pursuit of specific goals (i.e., the generation of positive values) is to be
left entirely to the subjective choice of the individual. This, it seems to me, is liberal-
ism par excellence.
The locating of legitimate positive interests solely with the individual, and
the exclusion of such interests from coercive or collective social deportment, so
that the social, the collective, and especially the state itself is wholly negative in
its orientation, is never perfectly actualized. Because human beings continue to
exist socially, their desires continue to have numerous social implications. There
remain all kinds of collective and/or coercive social institutions within the politi-
cal body, whose power requires dissociation from the state itself precisely because
of the positive, utopian, and ends-oriented character of such institutions. The most
obvious such institution, of course, at least in early modernity, was the church, a
social institution in which shared collective values of a utopian character form the
basis for belonging. In particular, churches are quasigovernmental and quasicoer-
cive institutions that promote particular positive (as opposed to purely instrumen-
tal) moral standards and specify particular ultimate goals. As such, the institution
of the church forms a strange and almost anti-liberal in-between land, resting
uneasily between the self-regulated (and value-oriented) individual and the wholly
negative (and thus categorically not value-oriented) modern liberal state. As Marx
insists in the Grundrisse, this individual, counterintuitively, is also a modern cre-
ation, an effect of social forces and not their first cause, and hence an illusion:
[T]his eighteenth-century individual—the product on one side of the disso-

lution of the feudal forms of society, on the other side of the new forces of
production developed since the sixteenth century. . . . Not as a historic result
but as history’s point of departure. As the Natural Individual appropriate
to their notion of human nature, not arising historically, but posited by
nature. . . . Only in the eighteenth century, in “civil society,” do the various
forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means
towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which
produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely
that of the hitherto most developed social (from this standpoint, general)
relations. The human being is in the most literal sense a zōon politichon,
not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself
only in the midst of society. (Marx 1993: 83–84)
Indeed, Marx explicitly links the modern invention of the individual to the idea of
religious sentiment in the seventh thesis on Feuerbach: “Feuerbach consequently
does not see that the ‘religious sentiment’ is itself a social product, and that the
abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of
society.” (Marx 1978b: 145).
“Religion” therefore comes to form a special political category in modernity—
one that creates a peripheral space for, and serves to account for, individualize, sen-
timentalize, and especially to domesticate whatever forms of persistent social and
collective action happen to retain a positive or utopian orientation that ill-accord, in

other words, with the personalization and individualization of the modern politi-
cal subject. Thus typically the political definitions of religion in modernity have
focused on the personal and choice-oriented—the psychological, cognitive, and
experiential—aspects of the practices imagined to be “religious,” at the expense
of the institutional, social, historical, coercive, and habitual features of these prac-
tices. We must stress this again to make it perfectly clear: The underplaying of the
collective or coercive aspects of ecclesiastical institutions is itself prescriptive—the
whole category is an effect of the modern state refusing to arrogate to itself (or
any collective body with coercive power) the right to dictate goals and ends to
individuals. And the category thus reinforces the notion that the utopian, the posi-
tive, and the fantastic can and must only be approached by the isolated, atomistic
individual, and never be dictated by the state.
These considerations should have a serious impact on how we interpret the
phenomenon of Disney World. What is particularly striking about all things
Disney related, and the Disney World amusement park in particular, is the way
in which they serve both to collect and to segregate the fantastic. Here we have what
is in effect an ideal world in microcosm that exists by virtue of its separation from
everyday reality, both spatially and temporally. That separation of the ideal from
the material is precisely what is effected by “religion” as a category: Imaginative
discourse and the “real world” are held to be sharply separate from one another,
categorically opposed. So is Disney World, where a visit to this pure—and quite
exceptional—land is just that: a visit, a trip, a holiday.8 Most do not live there,
and for those who do, the “magic” must wear thin very quickly (see Koenig 1994;
Mitchell 2010; Yee 2008). And, of course, the “world” here is bounded: On one’s
visit, one enters the grounds; and it is on those grounds, only and exclusively, that
the magic happens. And then, after the pre-delineated period of the visit is over,
one leaves the grounds and the fantastic behind.
The phenomenon of planned Disney communities, which may seem at odds
with these observations, actually reinforces them; here the segregation is more
purely spatial, although it has temporal dimensions as well. Carl Hiaasen describes
the Disney subdivision called “Celebration,” just a few miles from Disney World
itself, in the following terms:
With its neat, narrow streets and neotraditional architecture, Celebration

invokes nothing so much as a small-town neighborhood of the 1950s,
remembered overfondly. The houses, which feature wooden shutters and
open porches, could have been lifted off the lot of TV’s Leave it to Beaver.
Celebration boasts a school, a town hall, a library, parks, even a “down-
town” within walking distance of most of the homes. Yet by no means is it a
self-contained cell. All serious shopping is done in distant malls, and most
folks who live in Celebration make the grinding daily commute to Orlando.
There are no monorails or bullet trains or electric cars—just ordinary gas-
slurping sport-utility vehicles and sedans. (1998: 51)
Hiaasen here is reveling in the extent to which the Disney dream of enclosure is
unrealized. But what is more interesting in this example of segregation from the
“real world” is that, even though there is an effort here to create a whole “world” via
spatial segregation, some temporal segregation is also necessary. That is to say, the
“dream” embodied in Celebration is categorically not, in fact, a waking dream of per-
petual separation from the world but, rather, only a part-time dream, in which home
life—which in modern capitalism is typically temporally segregated from all other
aspects of social life—is the one aspect that receives insulation from the world.
Our point in drawing attention to all of this is not to stress that such behavior
reveals some underlying cultural and/or social malaise, although this may or may
not be true. Rather, the interesting thing about these forms of segregation is that
they appear to serve the same cultural and social functions as does the conceptual
invocation of “religion” to describe certain types of behavior. That is, by locating
its benefits, its experiential payload, in a segregated imaginary—an imaginary that
is not only felt and experienced in a way deliberately discontinuous from everyday
life but also communicated to its subjects via the medium of individual choice
and family life, the very restricted locations in which modernity permits the posi-
tive and utopian to function—what the whole Disney experience offers us is the
implicit and covert claim that the positive or utopian resides in a place distant
from the real world, one that can never be accessed at a social level but, rather,
must always be approached in terms of individual choice.
To some degree, this is an intrinsic function of those forms of social activity
that are normally denominated “religious.” Modernity’s creation of the category
“religion” was not necessary for those actual behaviors designated as “religious”
(which have long predated “religion” itself) to serve, as Marx said, as a “fantastic
realization of the human essence,” as a “sigh of the oppressed creature, the senti-
ment of a heartless world” (1978a: 54). Any projection of utopian desires onto a
fantastic, imaginary, or otherwise segregated reality—including the individual, or
home life, or romantic “love,” or personal hobbies, or other restricted spheres of
this sort—not only serves a compensatory function vis-à-vis grim reality, but also
serves the specific ideological function of implying that all utopian resolutions are
to be sought precisely in such segregated space and thus not in real social exis-
tence. The sociopolitical effect is ultimately conservative: There is no point in try-
ing to change this world; such hopes and dreams are not proper to it; they belong
in a misty realm that affects nothing and has legitimate claims on no one. There is
no doubt that such constructions as Disney World or even the model subdivision
of Celebration egregiously support this agenda.
But more specifically and uniquely to the modern age, the fictions of fantasy
or of religion are also self-consciously designated as fictions. The heart of human
desire can only, it would seem, be found in intimate, personal, imaginative activi-
ties. Any efforts to translate this heart of desire into the real operations of social
life—and most especially of the state—are precluded by its casting, its very defini-
tion, as imaginary, as distinctively other than “real life,” as segregated from the
mundane. For those of us foolish enough to miss this point and its lessons, more
explicit warnings are issued. Not only is fantasy by definition not reality; it is intrin-
sically dangerous even on its own terms (and hence must be segregated and very
effectively controlled). Worst of all, when one fails to heed these lessons, when one
attempts a Promethean theft of fantasy from fantasyland, the results for the “real”
world are nightmarish (these grim results are designated or implied by a variety
of prejudicial labels that include “terrorism,” “fundamentalism,” “totalitarianism,”
“mental illness,” “dogma,” and so on, all of which must be sharply and insistently
distinguished from “true” religion, which recognizes the limits of its utopian fan-
tasies). Disney is safe from grim reality because it is segregated; likewise, reality
is safe from Disney for the very same reason.9 This implication appears to be a
distinctively modern ideological operation, one that goes rather beyond the more
general ideological function of religion as false consolation. That is, the provision
of fantasyland offers an innocuous solace with few radical worldly effects; but the
strict segregation of fantasyland tells us that, really, not even an effort to provide
solace is possible unless it rigorously eschews the social organization in which we
actually live and in which we must, so it suggests, continue to live. “Outside,” here,
serves only to retrench the permanence of “inside.”10 Hence the state in particular
and all forms of collective activity in general are precluded from an orientation
toward concrete social change. Whether the exemplar of this assertion turns out to
be Mickey Mouse or Jesus Christ makes very little difference in the end.
The Simulacrum and its Relationship to Modernity

The fashion in which Disney World or the cinematic and other cultural products
of Disney are classic instances of what Jean Baudrillard has called “simulation”
might seem to be an issue best discussed under the rubric of postmodernism, but
it probably deserves separate consideration. To follow Baudrillard’s usage, Disney
is quintessentially oriented toward the simulacrum—the copy or representation of
something that never existed, the reference that refers only to itself and not to any
underlying “reality” (see Jameson 1991: 18; Baudrillard 1994). David Harvey makes
this connection explicitly:
This same phenomenon is exploited in entertainment palaces like Epcot

and Disneyworld; it becomes possible, as the U.S. commercials put it, “to
experience the Old World for a day without actually having to go there.”
The general implication is that through the experience of everything from
food, to culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema, it is
now possible to experience the world’s geography vicariously, as a simula-
crum. The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different
worlds (of commodities) in the same time and space. But it does so in
such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labor
processes that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their
production. (1990: 300)
What is at issue for Harvey is the simulacrum quality of Disney’s replications of

the world, whether the multicultural world of such items as “ethnic food” (with-
out, of course, having to deal with real, live “ethnics”) or the supposedly familiar
world of “Main Street, USA.”11 We are treated in this strange and special place
to self-conscious simulacra that point to nonentities or, instead, point to given
sets of representations rather than to the (in fact, nonexistent) entities those rep-
resentations allegedly represent. We are offered “representations” of experiences
that actually represent nothing, for the experiences to which they refer never had
any—and indeed do not pretend to have had any—underlying reality. The act of
reference here has moved from one that “masks the absence of a basic reality” to
one that “bears no relation to reality whatever” (Baudrillard 1993: 196) and thus, in
fact, celebrates and reinforces that absence.
The effect of this large-scale simulation is to suggest that the object of fantasy
is, precisely, fantastic. The simulacrum, in other words, although having an espe-
cially firm place in postmodern theory and postmodern aesthetics, also, at least
in its incarnation in Disney World, serves the quintessentially modern function of
alienating the positive and utopian realization of social goals from this world. It
locates identity and being in the personal, subjective, individual, and experiential,
in large measure by implying that pleasure and desire do not have external points
of reference. As such, it serves precisely the same function for political moder-
nity as, not religion itself, but the category or conceptual framing of “religion.”12
The modern categorization of religion, in fact, focuses precisely on reference to
the “supernatural” (or similar notions) as that which distinguishes religion from
other sociocultural expressions. This category—the supernatural—is itself little
more than an assertion that the thing being referred to lacks mundane reality, an
assumption strongly reproduced and reinforced by the efforts of some scholars to
account for religious “claims” and “beliefs” by reference to cognitive distortions
and biologically predetermined features of human mental activity (see chapter 5).
In all of this discourse, both popular and scholarly, “religion” comes to be defined
as a system of reference in which the thing referred to is not a “thing” at all, and
hence the “reference” is no reference but, in fact, is simulation.13
To a degree here, admittedly, the casting of Disney World and Disney-related

products as simulacra runs somewhat counter to Baudrillard’s conclusions about
this phenomenon. Baudrillard appears to think that the “catastrophic spiral” of
simulation is a very serious threat to reality as such and that it thus infects the
ability of social power to sustain itself (1993: 199). Nonetheless, he concedes that
the initial drift toward pure simulation came from modern capitalism itself: “If it
was capital which fostered reality, the reality principle, it was also the first to liq-
uidate it in the extermination of every use-value, of every real equivalence, of pro-
duction and wealth” (1993: 199). Thus does modernity anticipate and foreshadow
the features of postmodernity: The phenomenon of simulation served modernity
and its powers, both as a reflection of the commodity form and in its support of
modernity’s relentless assault on tradition. Perceived in terms of the modern con-
dition, Disney’s profusion of simulacra likewise operates in the service of power:
It erodes reality but in such a very specific way that only reality of a particular
sort is eroded. The “reality” called into question or exposed as groundless in Disney’s
simulations is the reality of value, of common or social goals, of ends-oriented communal
activity. That is, in a less than obvious but still extremely effective fashion, Disney
serves the quintessentially modern agenda of denying the reality—in the sense of
mundane efficiency—of traditional values, ironically, at the very same moment
that it celebrates the value of those values. Just as Baudrillard describes, simulacra
do erode reality, but in the focused sense that we see in Disney, this serves the social
order rather than threatening it.14
Postmodernity, Religion, and Consumerism

To the extent that all of these considerations are functions of modernity, strictly
speaking, some qualifications need to be made. Most obviously, some of the socio-
political features of modernity are being eroded in our world today, especially
the sovereign and artificial nation-state.15 This basic political entity seems in the
process of being gradually eroded by worldwide tendencies toward both global-
ization and tribalization (see Barber 1995). The nation-state seems less and less
to embody genuine sovereignty and social identity, these attributes falling more
and more under the purview of either amorphous multinational corporations and
associations (the IMF, the World Bank, the G8 and G20, the European Union,
NATO, etc.) or, in contrast, social and cultural entities defined not so much by
citizenship as by ethnic affiliation or some other “organic” identity marker. Lacking
a social basis for the construction of autonomous notions of self and identity (i.e.,
citizenship), the formerly self-evident identity and integrity of the individual are
fragmented or at least called into question. This process provides a material basis
for the typically postmodern discourse about the desuetude of the autonomous
(“Cartesian”) subject (on which, see, inter alia, Žižek 1999). In the face of such
fragmentation, identity comes increasingly to be expressed in nonindividualistic

or corporate terms, terms that do not require a basis in the state or citizenship
because they express social existence in terms of “natural” or (apparently) unme-
diated characteristics: primary language, skin color, ethnic roots, gender, and the
like.16 Such a phenomenon is visible, on the one hand, in the increasing promi-
nence of so-called identity politics and, on the other hand, in the recent tendency
of nations to dissolve into constituent, ethnically defined blocks, as we have seen
in the former Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Soviet Union, and elsewhere. In either
case, the identity of the members of these agglomerations is overtly socially dic-
tated rather than, as with liberal modernity, being determined in an (apparently)
identity-neutral political context through the free choice of the acting subject.17 In
such a situation, the exclusionary dimension of religion as a category is unim-
portant: The social body no longer has any recourse to the pretense that it has
no specific positive agenda, and in fact—perhaps as a result—social and political
agendas are increasingly expressed using the language, behaviors, and institutions
that modernity defines as “religious.”18 Thus we need to ask ourselves, even if the
comments above regarding modernity may be accepted in a postmodern—or at
least, so as not to beg the issue, a questionably modern—situation, what is the
function of religion, both as a conceptual category and as a “substance”? Moreover,
the postmodern aesthetic can be very closely associated with Disney (see, e.g.,
Bryman 1995: 162–174; Harvey 1990: 300; Jameson 1991: 300); the path-breaking
manifesto of postmodern architecture, Learning from Las Vegas, could just as easily
have referred itself to Disney World.19 Hence it is worth asking whether the post-
modern transformation of aesthetic values and social conceptualizations forces us
to reinterpret the impact and import of Disney as much as of religion.
The first point that needs to be made here concerns the explanation for this
apparent rise of identity rhetoric in the postmodern West that makes reference
to identities (e.g., Muslim, Christian, etc.) that are normally classified as “reli-
gions.” This phenomenon would actually seem paradoxical or ironic, at least at
first glance, for religion would appear to embody and promote those very things
in modernity that postmodernism finds most distasteful: the grand narrative,
essence, teleology, and so forth (see Arnal 1998: 62; McCutcheon 1997a: 8). But it
should also be noted that the effects of postmodernism are often strangely para-
doxical, which is a function of the conditions that generate the phenomenon in
the first place. As the comments above about the dissolution of the nation-state
should make clear, the political, social, and especially economic agendas of “postin-
dustrial” capitalism generate their own reactions, as well as reflections (see Harvey
1990: 292). The sociopolitical tribalism of “identity politics” is a case in point.
As both a reaction to and a reflection of modernity itself, it reacts to the growing
globalism and lack of coherent social differentiation in consumer society;20 yet
it simultaneously embodies, reflects, and promotes those same phenomena by
(1) working toward the further dissolution of the citizenship basis of the modern
nation, (2) generating a plethora of identities that can be chosen in the fashion
of consumer products, and (3) the evident ephemerality of its stock and arbitrary
“permanencies.”
As a socially embedded phenomenon, religion, or a return to religion, marks
consumer society as both a reaction and a reinforcement. Harvey offers a compel-
ling description of this apparent paradox:
Movements of all sorts—religious, mystical, social, communitarian,

humanitarian, etc.—define themselves directly in terms of an antagonism
to the power of money and of rationalized conceptions of space and time
over daily life. . . . Yet all such social movements, no matter how well articu-
lated their aims, run up against a seemingly immovable paradox. For not
only does the community of money, coupled with a rationalized space and
time, define them in an oppositional sense, but the movements have to
confront the question of value and its expression as well as the necessary
organization of space and time arrived at through the dynamics of capital
circulation. Capital, in short, continues to dominate, and it does so in part
through superior command over space and time. . . . The “otherness” and
“regional resistances” that postmodernist politics emphasize can flourish
in a particular place. But they are all too often subject to the power of capi-
tal over the co-ordination of universal fragmented space and the march of
capitalism’s global historical time that lies outside the purview of any par-
ticular one of them. (1990: 238–239)21
In other words, one could argue, the very fractured and identity-oriented tendency
of postmodern resistances, the very refusal to engage in universalizing projects
or even universalizing rhetoric, leaves the field clear—a vacuum—for “pure” eco-
nomic forces to dominate the sociocultural landscape in any and every overarching
fashion. Postmodern fragmentation can thus be understood as the ultimate ideo-
logical expression of laissez-faire economics.
More specifically, the aesthetic of postmodernism is an antiparticipatory one,
as its media exemplar, television, affirms.22 In this sense, its consumption of
images and identity—including the “tribalistic” identity markers noted above—
is in continuity with the excision of positive or ends-oriented discourse from the
social sphere. For the social sphere has here, in a sense, been thoroughly internal-
ized by the individual sphere. Such internalization obviates the necessity for such
modernistic half measures as denying positive or value-oriented discourses an
efficacious role in communal life. Communal life, in the context of postmodernity,
becomes itself a product to be consumed by the individual, a spectacle under the
individual’s gaze (see also Bauman 1998: 70; Bruce 1998: 29). This thoroughgoing
sort of consumerism makes all society (as such) the fantastic generation of the
individual and thus defuses the social implications of even society itself.23
As a result, we can see in the postmodern aesthetics of spectation or nonpar-
ticipation the conditions that allow for a revivification of religious techniques
of establishing identity without raising the specter of a positively defined social
entity. The Disney World spectacle, of course, reproduces, flaunts, and retrenches
this aesthetic.24 Various simulations of social entities are presented, side by side,
as an array to be sampled, gazed on, and observed, as if each were a choice,
each were suddenly equal, made so simply by an equal susceptibility to consump-
tion. Various national cultures become formally equal and exchangeable entities,
abstracted, like commodified labor, into a “mere” value form that, like the com-
modity itself, conceals all traces of the distinctive human (cultural) labor that
produced it. Italy is a choice in this moment; China, if it looks enticing, may be
the choice in the next. Harvey describes this intense commodification of cultural
expressions—with special and obviously relevant attention to architecture—in
the following terms:
Other postmodernists simply make gestures towards historical legiti-

macy by extensive and often eclectic quotation of past styles. Through
films, television, books, and the like, history and past experience are
turned into a seemingly vast archive “instantly retrievable and capable of
being consumed over and over again at the push of a button.” If, as Taylor
(1987, 105) puts it, history can be seen “as an endless reserve of equal
events,” then architects and urban designers can feel free to quote them
in any kind of order they wish. The postmodern penchant for jumbling
together all manner of references to past styles is one of its more perva-
sive characteristics. Reality, it seems, is being shaped to mimic media
images. (1990: 85)
The social is no longer closed to people by the austere requirements of a univer-

salizing modernity. Instead, it is superficially mediated to people as a pastiche of
decontextualized gestures.25 In both cases, however, is the state (“secular” or oth-
erwise) protected from incursions from substantive values—which are deemed to
be either personal or matters of (consumer) taste (compare the discussion of the
modern state in chapter 7).
Another important social feature of this cultural aesthetic is its antithetic rela-
tionship to some of the genuinely democratizing features of modernity. That is,
modernism,
partly for practical, technical, and economic, but also for ideological rea-
sons, did go out of its way to repress the significance of symbolic capital in
urban life. The inconsistency of such a forced democratization and egali-

tarianism of taste with the social distinctions of what, after all, remained a
class-bound capitalist society, undoubtedly created a climate of repressed
demand if not repressed desire (some of which was expressed in the cul-
tural movements of the 1960s). This repressed desire probably did play
an important role in stimulating the market for more diversified urban
environments and architectural styles. This is the desire, of course, that
many postmodernists seek to satisfy, if not titillate shamelessly. (Harvey
1990: 80–81)
The function of symbolic or “cultural” capital is to conceal the actual bases for
class distinctions, namely political and economic considerations. The deploy-
ment of cultural capital implies, precisely, an aristocracy—a domination of soci-
ety by the best people, people marked by culture and taste—and so smoothes the
edges of social distinctions actually founded on the bases of power and wealth.
We can thus see in postmodernism’s return to diversification and ornament both
a relaxation of modernism’s austere democratizing impulses in a more freely
laissez-faire society and simultaneously the revivification (in the absence of
austere universalism) of a potent ideological rationalizing mechanism for class
distinctions.
Given the aestheticization of social discourse noted above, these observations
apply as much to deliberate identity constructions as they do to architecture and
forms of “quotation” and pastiche. That is to say, the use of social quotation and
pastiche to construct individual identity in social, national, ethnic, or religious
terms is itself representative of new possibilities for redeploying “organic” iden-
tity markers to obscure class differences by figuring class as a function of “natu-
ral” or “given” circumstances. These new possibilities only emerge, of course,
with the desuetude of modernism’s universalizing tendencies, which obscure
class differences by appealing precisely to political (but, naturally, not eco-
nomic) egalitarianism. But they also emerge as a result of de facto equivalence or
exchangeability of the markers in question, which is precisely how these mark-
ers are able to function to underscore difference while at the same time denying
that difference should become a basis for social action (as opposed to merely
serving to mark identity). In a postmodern world then, religion need no longer
function as the repressed “Other” of civil society, defined more in terms of its
exclusion than its intrinsic character. Instead, its use by individuals is now recast
as a substance, a particular form of value that is, however, as (fetishized) value,
equivalent to all other forms of (cultural) value—fetishized nation, fetishized
ethnicity, or the fetishized America one sees at Disney World. The development
of the commodity form—or, rather, the extension of the power of the commodity
form to areas of human society that it may not have hitherto penetrated, most
particularly its extension inward to the core of self-identity—in its “postmodern”

completion thus brings religion around full circle: Its absolute internalization
restores to it the substantive social existence (but also complete social immer-
sion, like water in water) that it had before its redefinition in and by modernity.
Getting “beyond secularism” (see, e.g., Jakobsen 2000) in a postmodern world
is part of a larger tendency to demystify modernist universalizing discourses.
And it means the dissolving of religion back into some larger social fabric—
in this case, that of consumer capitalism and the fetishized commodity—from
which it cannot be distinguished. As is argued most emphatically in chapter 7,
“religion” requires its own exclusion; it requires “secularism” for its existence.
And both this modern need to separate out the religious and thereby to create
a new rationale and new conception of the state and the (perhaps) postmod-
ern tendency to reduce cultural forms to commodities are obvious products of
capitalism that are ubiquitous and deeply embedded within this socioeconomic
formation, being subject to the same kind of analysis as popular culture and,
specifically, an amusement park.
Conclusions
Disney, in all of its manifestations—theme parks, movie productions, and so
forth—appears to be simultaneously a manifestation of and a propagandistic ode
to American capitalism.26 Its ideological naturalizing and legitimating effects on
the given social status quo can be seen necessarily to have essentially the same
effects as religious discourse, which has historically served the nearly identical
ideological naturalizing function in whatever cultures it has pertained to. Beyond
this relatively commonsense generality, however, and to return to the question of
our typology, it would seem that the kinds of permutations to which both culture
in general and religion in particular have been subjected in the apparent transi-
tion from a condition of modernity to one of postmodernity are capable of being
demonstrated, in microcosm, in alternative readings of the Disney phenomenon.
Within the context and from the perspective of modernity, Disney’s generation
of fantasy qua fantasy appears to serve the same prophylactic function as the cat-
egory of “religion”: It retrenches the liberal claim that individual subjectivity is
the (sole) source of positive and ultimate values. On the other hand, within the
context and from the perspective of postmodernity, the Disney experience implies
the fetishization of identity and thus at least seems to militate against the deliberate
modern tendency to deny the social locus of identity. That the same entity can be
here subject to these different interpretations, and that these interpretations need
not contradict one another, tells us something about postmodernism’s relation to
modernity. That is to say, postmodernism does not appear to be a genuine depar-
ture or break from the conditions or cultural tendencies of modernity so much as
an extension of them in slightly modified directions. In the process, however, it

has carried over from modernity a strange reification—“religion”—that depends
on modernity itself for its very existence. The postmodern condition may be little
more than a particular extension of the modern condition, but its effect on our
interpretive categories and strategies, including those we apply to such cultural
artifacts as are designated “religious,” may demonstrate just how fluid, artificial,
and contingent those categories and strategies really are.
4
“Just Follow the Money”:

The Cold War, the Humanistic
Study of Religion, and the Fallacy
of Insufficient Cynicism
Angry cynicism still does more honour to human beings than

solemn protestations about man’s irreducible essence.
(Adorno 2002: 192)
in the early 1990s, David Miller, the well-known Jungian scholar of myth and
religion and then-professor at Syracuse University, presented a guest lecture at
the University of Tennessee, in which he argued for the continued relevance of
the humanities for the mission of the university, lamenting cuts to funding for
higher education in the United States (cuts that, over the coming two decades,
would continue to grow). To help make the argument that a new renaissance
in the humanities was required, he drew on the example of the Soviet launch
of Sputnik, on October 4, 1957, and the United States’ response of increasing
funding throughout academia.1 The mention of the Soviet satellite in a lecture on
myth and humanities funding may strike some as odd, because the link between
the 55-year-old, 184-pound, beachball-sized satellite and Miller’s argument con-
cerning the relevance of the study of myth for the future well-being of the nation
is not immediately apparent. But the inability to connect these dots was not
shared by most of the people who attended the lecture, for whom the mention of
Sputnik was a transparent reference filled with obvious meaning and continued
relevance.2
Although we should not over-read Miller’s example, neither should we dismiss
it as a purely innocent rhetorical move, and thus fall victim to what one writer who
“Just Follow the Money” 73
has studied the impact of the Cold War on area studies has called “the fallacy of
insufficient cynicism”:
I frequently chide myself for running afoul of what I might call the fallacy
of insufficient cynicism. I had not, for example, imagined the lengths to
which the FBI would go to investigate even the most trifling aspects of life
in academe in the early Cold War period. (Cumings 1998: 166)
Because far too many books on the history of the study of religion portray the field
as if it was solely driven by the internal engine of great ideas and irreducibly per-
sonal beliefs that are necessarily disconnected from any sociopolitical context—pre-
suming, as some might, that the impersonal and irresistible force of secularization
was responsible for the advent of our academic discipline—it is a useful corrective,
instead, to read this casual mention with a great deal of suspicion. The juxtaposi-
tion of the launch of the first Sputnik and this lecturer’s thoughts on the continued
health of the study of myth and religion—not to mention the health of the nation—
provides a point of entry into the critical analysis of the sociopolitical context from
which the publicly funded study of religion arose in the United States. If we are
arguing that the category of religion itself ought to be demystified, then perhaps the
history of the academic study of religion ought to be demystified as well. Recovering
the political in writing that history is therefore one step in this direction.
The suspicion that prompts this reading gains momentum when we recover the
arguments from writers in the Cold War era who were equally persuaded that the
humanities were just as necessary as research in the so-called hard sciences if the
worldwide preeminence of the so-called Western culture was to be ensured. Although
one could easily cite a writer such as Mircea Eliade to support this contention (spe-
cifically, his thoughts on the new humanism to which the history of religions would
contribute, all working toward a renaissance of Western civilization) (as critiqued in
McCutcheon 1997b: 37 ff), instead, consider the comments of Dennis Gabor (1900–
1979), the Hungarian-born British physicist and humanist who won the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1971, published in the journal Encounter in May of 1960:
It is a sad thought that our civilization has not produced a New Vision which
could guide us into a new “Golden Age” which has now become physically
possible, but only physically. . . . Who is responsible for this tragi-comedy
of Man frustrated by success? . . . Who has left Mankind without a vision?
The predictable part of the future may be the job for electronic predictors
but the part of it which is not predictable, which is largely a matter of free
human choice, is not the business of the machines, nor of scientists . . . but
it ought to be, as it was in the great epochs of the past, the prerogative of
the inspired humanists. (Quoted in the foreword to Holbrook ix)
Read into its historical context, Gabor’s effort to link humanistic learning to tech-
nological advances, all for the purpose of a civilizational renaissance, becomes all
the more interesting, especially given that the monthly British periodical in which
these comments were published was one of many initiatives undertaken by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Paris-based, CIA-established organization that
flourished between 1950 and 1967.3 That Gabor’s comments were then used by
Clyde Holbrook to set the table for his well-known 1965 apologia for reconceiving
the study of religion as a humanistic, rather than theological, discipline is all the
more significant. Although hesitating to accept Gabor’s portrait of the humanist as
an “inspired prophet,” after quoting these lines, the general editor for the series in
which Holbrook’s volume appeared—Richard Schlatter—at least acknowledges in
his foreword to the volume that humanistic scholarship “is essential to enable us
to distinguish the inspired prophet from the fanatical Pied Pipers” (Holbrook ix).4
This in turn helps to establish Holbrook’s own argument that the nonsectarian,
humanistic study of religion is essential to a “liberalizing education,” as in when
he observes that “one of the most persuasive reasons offered for the resurgence
of interest in religion in the academic world was the overdue realization by all but
the most prejudiced opponents that religious phenomena constitute so large a
segment of human experience that without specialized study and instruction in it,
a college or university could scarcely be regarded as offering a liberalizing educa-
tion” (68–69).
Keeping in mind this often-found linkage between a renaissance of Western civ-
ilization in general and the future well-being of the United States in particular, on
the one hand, and the humanistic scholar of religion conceived as someone who is
“directly and pertinently related to a most important area of human life” (Holbrook
290), on the other,5 we turn our attention to an important book—important because
it stands out as the only book-length investigation of the Cold War setting of the
study of religion in both Europe and North America.6 Despite the impressive range
of its chapters and the obvious expertise of its 22 authors, our present interest con-
cerns merely its final section, notably those chapters by Luther H. Martin (2001)
and Donald Wiebe (2001). Their contributions to this volume tackle the question of
whether the U.S. field’s rebirth in the 1960s merely coincided with the peak of the
Cold War or if the publicly funded, humanistic study of religion—for good or ill—
was intended as but one more way to defeat the “godless Communists.” Deciding
this point is no easy task because, as Wiebe points out,
there is no direct evidence that any direct support, whether from govern-
ment agency or private foundation, is responsible for the entry of religious
studies into the curriculum of college and universities in North America
in the 1960s and no evidence that its research agendas were influenced to
any great degree by specific Cold War values. (280)
Although we agree that the evidence is hard to come by, before trying to link the
realization that the Soviet Union possessed the technology to launch interconti-
nental ballistic missiles to the invention of the humanistic study of religion, it is
worthwhile to tease out two separate issues that Wiebe addresses in this passage.
On the one hand, there is the issue of determining whether there existed any direct
public and private funding that was “responsible for the entry of religious studies
into the curriculum of college and universities in North America”—we take this
to be a structural or institutional level of analysis—and, on the other, there is the
issue of determining whether there exists any “evidence that its research agendas
were influenced to any great degree by specific Cold War values”—what amounts
to an analysis of the specific sort of content made possible by its institutional
structure. Whereas both Martin’s and Wiebe’s essays are more concerned with
the latter, for the time being, we are exclusively concerned with the former. To
rephrase: Regardless of the type of scholarship carried out in these newly founded,
publicly funded programs—whether openly theological, cryptotheological, or
social-scientific—we are concerned with how it is that these institutional niches
came into existence in the first place.
With this structural or institutional level of analysis in mind, then, we must begin
with the thoroughly historical presumption that, although no single cause likely
exists, there may nonetheless be considerable circumstantial evidence to prompt
further studies of what the Cold War setting had to do with the widely successful
invention of religious studies departments all across the United States (as but one
national example) in the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s. We believe that the rein-
vention of the confessional (largely Protestant) study of religion as a humanistic dis-
cipline eligible for tax dollars cannot adequately be understood apart from the context
provided by the Cold War.7 Certainly those who participated in the invention of the
publicly funded study of religion did not necessarily report the Cold War setting as
being among the causes of their efforts to invent a new academic discipline; follow-
ing Schrecker in her study of McCarthyism’s impact on the U.S. university system,
we therefore wish to follow a rule that is basic to all work throughout the human sci-
ences: “It is important . . . to go beyond the rhetoric of the period and examine what
these people were doing rather than what they were saying” (1986: 10).
This having been said, it would be terribly mistaken to tackle the study of any
complex sociohistorical system by looking for smoking guns in the hands of lone
agents or a small group of coconspirators (which runs contrary to the habit in our
field of looking for pristine origins in the hearts of charismatic founders). Although
it is not difficult to recover historical evidence that people at this time throughout
the United States thought, along with Henry Luce (chairman of Time, Inc., and
founder of the now well-known Luce Foundation, which has played an important
role in helping to fund research in our own field), that the Cold War was a holy war
and that the United States, like ancient Israel, was “obviously designed for some
special phase of God’s eternal purpose” (Saunders 281),8 linking such rhetoric of
Manifest Destiny to the entry of the study of religion into the family of publicly
funded humanities fields requires evidence. So, although we acknowledge that
there may be no smoking gun, there is nonetheless an awful lot of smoke coming
from the documents of this era and from the correlations between the history of
our field in the United States and the dramatic political events that were taking
place at the time. In this chapter, we wish to sketch one way to start accumulating
enough circumstantial evidence to warrant further investigation of the connection
between the Cold War-time basis of the U.S. economy and the invention of the
humanistic study of religion. Contrary to Wiebe, then, we are inclined to agree
with Martin, who concludes that “the study of religion which was developed in the
United States during this period must be seen as being in some way legitimated
by the religio-political obsessions of that time, certainly in the selection of Asian
and Third World ‘religions’ for its dominant subject matter” (220). The trick will
be determining just what constituted the “in some way legitimated by” to which
Martin refers. If we can make this determination, then we will have gone a consid-
erable distance toward finding the direct evidence that Wiebe rightly calls for.
Identifying these links, however, is not merely an idle, intellectual activity.
Given the events that have transpired over the past few years, this project takes on
special significance, because the extent to which the United States’ so-called “War
on Terrorism” has impacted economies and political structures around the world
is more than likely the closest we have come in recent times to seeing the world-
wide effects of the Cold War half a century ago. Like the Cold War, the War on
Terrorism can easily be understood as a clash of social systems (what Tariq Ali has
called a “clash of fundamentalisms” [2002]) that is now being acted out—often
violently—in a host of international sites, against an enemy that is both highly
visible (e.g., stereotypes of the fanatical “Islamist,” on the battlefield, protesting
in the streets in some distant setting, or caged as “unlawful combatants” at a U.S.
detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and utterly invisible at the same time
(as with the onetime anti-Communist and even anti-homosexual rhetorics in the
United States, even your neighbor might be one of “them”—the proverbial enemy
in our midst). If the Cold War setting of the emergent field turns out to be one of
the necessary preconditions for establishing the humanistic study of religion as a
legitimate academic pursuit, then perhaps the War on Terrorism, and the widely
shared presumption that the study of deeply personal beliefs somehow helps to
bring about mutual understanding and tolerance among so-called peace-loving
peoples everywhere, will also play a role in helping to understand any efforts to
strengthen and extend the influence of the humanistic study of religion.9 As has
been argued elsewhere, if the discourse on tolerance and mutual understanding
that we find throughout the study of religion is but one method for establishing a
liberal hegemony (McCutcheon 2001a: chapter 10; McCutcheon 2003: chapter 12;
and see chapter 3 herein), then there may be surprising contemporary relevance
in researching and writing the field’s Cold War history.
To break out of the apolitical “history of ideas” model that continues to domi-
nate our attempts to understand the development of our own field and its current
social role (not to mention our supposed object of study)10—and thereby distin-
guishing what McCumber calls a merely intellectual from a disciplinary history
(2001: xx)—we could follow the advice of the infamous informant code-named
“Deep Throat” (revealed in 2005 to be Mark Felt, an FBI agent at the time), who
is said to have told Watergate investigators Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
to “just follow the money.” Once the primary control over the taxon religion
was removed from privately funded divinity schools, a significant infusion of
public dollars constituted the necessary precondition for the field’s reinvention.
We can follow the money in a variety of ways: the direct and the indirect funds;
the criteria for, and awarding of, graduate fellowships; the ways in which new
journals were funded to distribute and authorize knowledge; the sabbatical and
research grants; the grants for curriculum development; and contributions to
the general operating expenses of new university departments and library collec-
tions. We could do this by examining such sources as the Pew Charitable Trusts;
originating in 1948 (shortly after the end of the Second World War and at the
dawn of the Cold War), its aim was to assist “America’s will to protect democracy
in Europe and the world,” as described by the Trust’s own history. (As a mea-
sure of its modern influence, consider that between 2001 and 2011, its religion
program alone awarded 39 grants for a total of over $84 million.11) We could
also investigate such private funding sources as the Danforth, Carnegie, Ford,
Rockefeller, Hazen, and Luce Foundations, all agencies whose mid-20th-century
missions and practices dovetailed nicely with attempts to bring about a renais-
sance in American democracy in particular, as well as recovering and spreading
what were understood to be the deepest moral values yet attained by Western
civilization in general.
In following the money, we will of course have to distinguish between various
types of funding: not just private and public, but also those funds that had a struc-
tural impact (e.g., funding renovations of facilities as well as new construction,
establishing new language and area studies programs, providing matching funds
for professors’ and support staff salaries, etc.) and those that played a supplemental
role in shaping particular research and publishing agendas (e.g., incentives to do
research in specific content areas, assistance to attend certain conferences, learn
specific modern or ancient languages, win grants for certain types of sabbatical
research, etc.). Given that our concern is with the structural level of analysis,12 to
start on this project of tracking “the infusion of public funding that followed upon
the successful 1957 launch of Sputnik” (as phrased by Martin [212]), we would like
to focus on a significant source of public funds that comprised one of the most
sweeping educational reform initiatives in U.S. history: the U.S. federal govern-
ment’s (i.e., taxpayer-financed) National Defense Education Act (NDEA).
Signed into law on September 2, 1958, the NDEA was originally authorized for
only four years but was subsequently extended in scope and duration, eventually
becoming part of the 1965 Higher Education Act, and then absorbed into 1980’s
far-reaching amendments to the 1965 Act. The original Act of 1958 was composed
of several programs, or titles, each addressing a distinct area of need: student
loans for higher education (a portion of which could be “forgiven” if one went into
a teaching profession; $1,305,043 alone was forgiven in this manner after only the
first four years of the NDEA); funds to strengthen science, math, and modern for-
eign language instruction throughout all school levels; graduate student funding
known as National Defense Fellowships; funds for increasing the quality of guid-
ance counseling and career-aptitude testing; funds to establish centers for the study
of modern foreign languages; funds for vocational and technological training; and
funds to assist the collection, dissemination, and analysis of scientific research
(United States Statutes at Large, Part 1 1959). Over the coming decade, a gravy train
rolled throughout virtually every field in the university, with billions of tax dollars
being invested to carry out the NDEA’s various programs—by our accounting, just
over $123 million was spent in the NDEA’s first year (1959–1960); in subsequent
years the government spent approximately $225 million (1960–1961), $191 million
(1961–1962), $213 million (1962–1963), and $228 million (1963–1964), for a total
over its first five years of $980 million.13 In today’s dollars, the total for just the first
five years alone would be over $7 billion.
The rationale for this massive redistribution of wealth is apparent in the open-
ing line to the legislation’s “Declaration of Policy,” where it is observed that “the
security of the Nation requires the fullest development of the mental resources and
technical skills of its young men and women.” It goes on to read: “The present
emergency demands that additional and more adequate educational opportunities
be made available. The defense of this Nation depends upon the mastery of modern
techniques developed from complex scientific principles” (United States Statutes at
Large, Part 1 1959: 1581). The NDEA, therefore, was designed to address what law-
makers termed an “educational emergency” by correcting “as rapidly as possible the
existing imbalances in our educational programs which have led to an insufficient
proportion of our population educated in science, mathematics, and modern for-
eign languages and trained in technology.” The NDEA therefore aimed to “provide
substantial assistance . . . in order to insure trained manpower of sufficient quality
and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States” (1582).
Although the source of this “educational emergency” is not specifically men-
tioned in the legislation, it is not difficult to connect this rhetoric of crisis to
the launch of Sputnik, especially when reading the NDEA’s early annual reports.
“Passage of the act,” the reader of the report for the fiscal year 1963, is told, “was
occasioned by the sudden challenge to our scientific and technological suprem-

acy posed by the appearance in orbit of the first man-made satellite,” ominously
adding, “a satellite made not in the United States but in Russia” (Report on the
NDEA, Fiscal Year 1963 1964: 1). Although the NDEA report for 1963 mentions
various other causal factors that also existed at this time—such as “the explosion
of new knowledge,” the effect of previously insufficient funding for education,
inequalities between various school systems throughout the country, and “the
continued rise of school enrollments and the tidal wave threatening to engulf
the colleges”—the report’s efforts to portray these factors as the “deeper causes
[which were] at work demanding changes and improvements to our educational
system” (Report on the NDEA, Fiscal Year 1963 1964: 1) are not persuasive. Simply
put, regardless of how important such “deeper causes” were or how long reform-
ers may have been lobbying for what admittedly might have been a long-overdue
overhaul of the U.S. educational system, it was the steady drumbeat of a highly
effective rhetoric of crisis occasioned by the launch of a manmade Soviet satel-
lite—broadcast first on ham radios tracking Sputnik’s faint beeps, soon played
out in photo spreads in Life magazine chronicling advances in Soviet schooling,
reported in New York Times exposés (as early as November of 1957) on the crisis
in the American educational system (Dickson 160), and eventually debated in
U.S. congressional hearings—that provided the catalyst for this massive funding
initiative signed into law by President Eisenhower.14 If we take into account that
despite the fact that “[b]y 1953 a flood of articles and books had appeared” (Dow
11) advocating extensive education reform (one of which bore the wonderful title
Quackery in the Public Schools), but by the “early 1950s a series of bills in sup-
port of public education had been introduced in Congress, but not a single one
reached the president’s desk for signature” (Dickson 225), then it seems reason-
able to infer that without “a satellite made not in the United States but in Russia”
passing over U.S. soil every 96 minutes, little educational reform would have
happened. In fact, the first annual report’s introductory claim that “the defense
and security of the Nation are inseparably bound with education” loses much, if
not all, of its rhetorical punch without the crisis occasioned by the Soviet satellite
(Report on the NDEA, Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1959 1960: 1).15 That the national
security argument, although stated first in this report, immediately leads to what
is described as the “single purpose” of the NDEA—“that every young person
from the day he enters school should have an opportunity to develop his gifts to
the fullest extent”—seems to be evidence of Cold War doublespeak, insomuch as
the structural level of analysis (i.e., the military-industrial-educational argument)
is personified, and thereby obscured, by means of the “equality of access” argu-
ment. Studies of our field’s history that shift the conversation from the analysis
of structural constraints to individual motives, beliefs, and feelings of isolated
actors are just as obscurantist. Such obscurantism is to our benefit, however, if
we wish to portray our scholarly pursuits (and their object of study) as somehow
removed from history, as if the content of our work and the ideals of scholar-
ship could somehow float free of the practical, material context that makes both
of them possible. Taking into the account the general unwillingness of many
U.S. philosophers to understand their own discipline as having a specific history,
McCumber phrases the point as follows:
[I]f philosophy professors provide no account of themselves, of how they

got to be where they are or of where they are going, then the impression
given to their students is inevitably that they somehow dropped from
heaven. What drops from heaven is hardly open to discussion, much less
criticism. The usefulness of such a standpoint to the professor can hardly
be disputed. (2001: 11)
Because this understanding of the meaning and content of their work as somehow
predating historical and thus contingent grammars and structures also informs
the self-understanding of many scholars of religion (who are more at home work-
ing in the history of big ideas), it is little wonder then, as Wiebe points out in
the introduction to his chapter, that we “seldom even come across mention of
the Cold War in the literature of the field” (267). We seldom come across explicit
mention of it perhaps because—at least as McCumber thinks, with reference to
the effect the McCarthy purges had on the discipline of philosophy—it may be our
“repressed family secret” (18).
Although reversing this repression means determining the ways in which all
of the NDEA’s various funds (i.e., titles) were used, one can begin to “follow the
money” merely by focusing on the use of the National Defense Fellowships, which
fall under Title IV of the NDEA. These fellowships serve as an example of how the
necessary (though hardly sufficient) conditions were put into place that made it
possible, perhaps even desirable, to reinvent the confessional study of religion as
a tax-supported humanistic discipline.
The fellowships were worth $2,000 in the first year (over $15,000 in today’s
dollars, making the NDFs competitive with some current graduate stipends); the
award increased by $200 per year and could be held by a doctoral student for
a total of three years. Recipients could receive an additional $400 annually per
dependent, and the institution in which recipients were pursuing their educa-
tion received a yearly payment of $2,500 to assist it in providing its educational
services. In the NDEA’s first year (1958–1959), 1,000 fellowships were awarded
nationally, and in each subsequent year, 1,500 new fellowships were awarded, such
that soon several thousand recipients, all at different stages of their doctoral stud-
ies, could be holding the fellowship in any given year. Students who were eligible
for this award were those pursuing not just a doctoral degree, but a doctoral degree
in a new or expanded existing program in the sciences, math, or modern foreign

language study. However, despite this apparently narrow definition of eligibility,
from the outset, doctoral students in not just such areas as biology, theoretical
physics, or electrical engineering received these funds, but also students earn-
ing a Ph.D. in various disciplines within the social sciences and the humanities.
(A quick search of faculty curriculum vitae on google.com reveals scores of aca-
demics whose humanities Ph.D.s were earned in the United States during this
time period and who were awarded NDFs.) Although students enrolled in, for
example, Chinese language and history along with what was then called Russian
studies seem to have obviously met the overt geopolitical intentions of the NDEA,
students working in entomology, American studies, veterinary medicine, music,
English, philosophy, and classics were all awarded fellowships in the NDEA’s
inaugural year. Despite the fact that an organized field known as religious studies
was still several years away from being a nationwide reality in the United States,
as readers will see from the table 4.1, over the course of the NDEA’s first few years,
the study of religion in its many guises was well represented among the ranks of
National Defense Fellows.
To put these numbers into some sort of context, consider that in the NDEA’s
first year, 18 of the available 1,000 NDFs were awarded in an area that could be
characterized as falling under the admittedly large umbrella of the study of reli-
gion (regardless of how it was practiced), whereas English departments received
a total of 78 fellowships.16 Given that in the academic year 1959–1960, religious
studies departments had yet to be instituted throughout the U.S. public univer-
sity system, and given that English departments had long been, and continue
to be, a mainstay of the humanities divisions of colleges of arts and sciences,
18 fellowships compared to 78 are more than respectable. With this in mind, it
is important to note at this point that, contrary to some characterizations (e.g.,
Wiebe 271), the humanities benefited more than just indirectly from such federal
Cold War programs as the NDF. For example, of the six general areas in which
the first year’s worth of NDFs were awarded physical science and mathematics
received 224 fellowships (or 22 percent of the total); biological sciences received
158 (16 percent); engineering received 59 (6 percent); the social sciences received
264 (26 percent); education received 47 (5 percent); and scholars in the humani-
ties received 248 (25 percent). Accordingly, it is a mischaracterization to see such
programs as the NDEA as primarily devoted to research in the hard sciences
and only (by means of a dispersion or trickle-down effect) of secondary benefit
to the humanities. Returning to those awards that were given out in religion,
doctoral students classified by the government as studying religion, in one way
or another, received 0.18 percent of the total number of fellowships awarded in
the first year of the NDEA (in which 1,000 NDFs were awarded). The number of
new fellowships awarded in religion increased significantly to 32 out of 1,500 the
Table 4.1 National Defense Education Act, 1958 Title IV: National Defense Fellowships (NDF) Awards in areas of direct
relevance to the study of religion, as a portion of the total number awarded per year per institution*
School Program 1959–60 1960–61 1961–62 1962–63
Claremont Graduate School, CA Religion: Oriental & Christian — 4/19 3/12 —

Emory University, GA Old Testament 3/9 — — —
University of Iowa, IA Contemporary Religion — — — 2/29
Brandeis, MA Near Eastern & Judaic Studies — — 5/12 —
Columbia University, NY Near & Middle East Studies 3/3 7/11 — —
New York University, NY Hebrew Culture & Civilization 3/3 5/15 4/11 —
Union Theological Seminary, NY Theology 5/5 — — —
University of Rochester, NY Church Music — 5/13 — —
Duke University, NC Religion: Church Hist/Xian Ethics — 4/18 3/19 —
Dropsie University, PA** Comparative Religions 3/3 3/3 — —
Brown University, RI Religious Studies 1/5 4/24 2/25 —
University of Wisconsin, WI Buddhist Studies — — 4/27 —
TOTAL 18/28 32/103 21/106 2/29
*
Source: Report on the National Defense Education Act, Fiscal Years 1961 and 1962, a Summary of Programs Administered by the Office of Education
Under Public Law 85–864 (1963), Table 17. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. The original table reports the school, area, and number of
NDFs awarded over the course of the NDEA’s first four years.
**
Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning was founded in 1907 by a bequest from the estate of Moses Aaron. Dropsie (1821–1905) was located in
Philadelphia and produced over 200 doctoral degrees before it was destroyed by fire in 1981. It was reconstituted as the Annenberg Research Institute in
1986, and in 1993, it became the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, sponsoring postdoctoral research.
following year (0.021 percent), declined somewhat to 21 of 1,500 in 1961–1962

(0.014 percent) and then virtually dropped off the radar screen altogether, num-
bering only 2 in 1962–1963, both of which were held by students at the University
of Iowa (0.0013 percent).17
Determining the cause of this drop in NDFs awarded to religion doctoral stu-
dents—and whether the severe drop was reversed by the invention of the human-
istic study of religion in the following years—likely holds a key to unlocking at
least one of the direct and unambiguous links between the Cold War funding
initiatives for higher education and the reincarnation of the confessional study of
religion as religious studies. To help sketch how one might go about finding this
key, consider that this time period, the early 1960s, is just when assorted lower
court challenges to such things as public elementary school prayer were about
to make it onto the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court (e.g., Engel v. Vitale, 1962;
Abington v. Schempp, 1963)—a time when the Court was just beginning to recon-
sider how the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses affected
the place of religious instruction in the public school system. With this in mind, it
makes sense that mid-20th-century students in the study of religion—in its many
incarnations—would receive NDF funding and that the first annual report on the
NDEA would single out and celebrate the fact that the NDF was “unique among
Federal fellowship programs in that it makes no restriction as to field of study and
sets no priority among the various fields in the award of fellowships” (Report 1960:
15). It seems sensible, then, that funds in these early years were awarded to young
scholars to study such topics as the Old Testament at Emory (a Methodist institu-
tion; Candler School of Theology was founded in 1914 and became part of Emory
in 1915), Christian ethics at Duke (also with Methodist origins), church music at
the University of Rochester (a private Baptist school founded in 1850), theology at
Union Theological Seminary (founded in 1836 as a nondenominational Christian
institution), and what was then called comparative religion at Dropsie University
(the onetime College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia, and now
the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Judaic Studies, a postdoctoral research
institute).
In 1964, however, the NDEA was amended by the 88th U.S. Congress; among
the changes introduced by this amendment was extending the NDEA to the study
of nursing at accredited schools and, conversely, severely limiting the funding of
religion studies. We quote at length from the U.S. Statutes for 1964:
No fellowship shall be awarded under this title for study at a school or

department of divinity. For the purpose of this subsection, the term “school
or department of divinity” means an institution, or department or branch
of an institution, whose program is specifically for the education of stu-
dents to prepare them to become ministers of religion or to enter upon
some other religious vocation or to prepare them to teach theological

subjects. (U.S. Statutes at Large 1965: Public Law 88–665, Oct. 16, 1964,
Sec. 402 [d])
What is most fascinating about this amendment is just how different its spirit is
from the Bush administration’s “Faith-Based Initiative” (under Barack Obama, it
is known as the President’s Advisory Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood
Partnerships), as well as from the attitude of many openly theological members
of such organizations as the American Academy of Religion. We must there-
fore recall that, in the mid-1960s, all studies of religion receiving public support
were potentially seen to be in conflict with the establishment clause of the U.S.
Constitution’s First Amendment. Indeed, as Richard Schlatter correctly points out
in his foreword to Holbrook’s volume:
A considerable body of American scholars are of the opinion that religious

studies are no part of the humanities, no part of the liberal arts, not an
objective scholarly discipline. These scholars think of traditional religious
scholarship as a professional study preparatory to the tasks of indoctrina-
tion and conversion and want it relegated to the seminaries of the various
denominations. (Holbrook ix–x)
The difference between then and now is striking, for despite the degree to which
scholars of religion are still often mistaken for (or recognized as) cryptotheologians,
our place in the humanities is generally taken for granted, so much so that—with
a heaping dose of postmodern irony—theologians now openly claim membership
in the publicly supported humanistic study of religion. But forty years ago this was
not the case, as signified by the fact that the only explicitly singled-out groups who
were ineligible to hold NDFs were those doing doctoral work in a divinity school
and those who were incapable of signing the oath attached to the NDEA; we quote
once again at length from the U.S. Statutes, this time from 1958:
No part of any funds appropriated or otherwise made available for expen-

diture under authority of this Act shall be used to make payments or loans
to any individual unless such individual (1) has executed and filed with the
Commissioner an affidavit that he does not believe in, and is not a member
of and does not support any organization that believes in or teaches, the
overthrow of the United States Government by force or violence or by any
illegal or unconstitutional methods, and (2) has taken and subscribed to an
oath or affirmation in the following form: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm)
that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United States of America
and will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States
against its enemies, foreign and domestic.” (U.S. Statutes at Large 1959:
Public Law 85–864, Sept. 2, 1958, Sec. 1001 [ f ])18
So, apart from divinity students, the only other groups who could not hold an
NDF were Communists (as well as applicants who failed to disclose their criminal
past [not counting crimes for which they were convicted prior to the age of 16
and minor traffic violations resulting in a fine of less than $25]). As an aside, we
presume that the 1964 amendment also impacted those who were eligible to hold
student loans under the NDEA, since 42 different theological institutions were
involved in the NDEA’s loan program during its second year (Report 1961: 4; see
also table 4 in that report).
Although it would be remiss to leave the impression that we were arguing that
divinity students in the early 1960s had anything significant in common with
Communists and criminals (though, as pointed out by McCutcheon’s colleague
in Alabama, Ted Trost, it is no secret that the masters of divinity degree was one
of the domestic refuges of U.S. antiwar protesters, making programs that offered
these degrees possible targets for conservative politicians with a vendetta against
the antiwar movement), we do wish to leave the impression that it was in the best
self-interest of liberal scholars who studied religion in the early 1960s to per-
suade their peers in the university, as well as their overseers in government, that
they were as legitimate a scholarly pursuit as any other humanistic discipline. If
the pattern of NDFs awarded to doctoral students in religion is any indication, at
stake was their ability to receive not simply student funding but significant grants
toward the operating expenses of new institutional units. It is hard not to think of
this time period as being characterized by a dream come true for a generation of
young, highly motivated, entrepreneurial academics who had already been thor-
oughly disillusioned with the denominationally based study of religion and who
were therefore primed to reinvent their field, along with their own scholarly inter-
ests, as but one more branch of the humanities—trading research on the fate of
the eternal soul for scholarship on the enduring human spirit. After all, writing
shortly after the U.S. Congress amended the NDEA to exclude divinity students,
Holbrook observed that “[t]he favorite dream of the seminary and college profes-
sor of religion is one in which at last the sluice gates of funds will be opened in
his direction. . . . This dream should not be allowed to fade into fantasy” (275). As
he goes on to speculate, “if religion scholarship were more widely disengaged
from theological institutions and placed within the framework of humanistic
studies in universities, public and private, it could become the recipient of funds
now inaccessible to it. . . . Once this role [i.e., the study of religion as a humanistic
subject] is firmly established, perhaps there will follow increased opportunities
for the grants and support now made available to other humanistic scholars”
(281–282).19
If it is correct that scholars in the mid-to-late 1960s were among the vanguard of
those who worked to prevent this dream from becoming an idle fantasy, then it is
no coincidence that the more broadly salvific quest of the liberal humanist scholar
for the abiding permanence of “meaning” lodged deep within the human condi-
tion so efficiently replaced the more narrowly salvific quest of the liberal Protestant
theologian’s preoccupation with the abiding permanence of faith in the Holy
Spirit. After all, humanistic makeovers were happening all around these young
scholars: The National Council on Religion in Higher Education (founded, along
with the Kent Fellows Program, by Yale University’s Charles Foster Kent in 1923)
was reincarnated in 1962 as the Society of Religion in Higher Education—along
with the Danforth Foundation taking over the funding for the Kent Fellowship
Program—and was eventually renamed in 1975 the Society for Values in Higher
Education (SVHE). In its 50th year of publication, The Christian Scholar—until
1953 titled Christian Education—was reconceived and renamed in 1967 as the
SVHE’s liberal humanist journal Soundings (vol. 93 was published in 2010). Then
in 1965, Princeton University’s Council of the Humanities, with financial support
from the Ford Foundation (through its Ford Humanities Project), commissioned
14 “state-of-the-art” surveys of “Humanistic Scholarship in America,” two of which
were Holbrook’s already-quoted volume, Religion: A Humanistic Field—concerned
not only with “acquainting a larger public with religion’s role in the ensemble of
the humanities” (xi), but also with the larger, nationalist task of documenting and
correcting the fact that “[w]e do not produce [scholarship on religion] in propor-
tion to our numbers or to the religious vitality of American culture” (258)20—along
with Paul Ramsey’s edited survey of the field’s several sub-areas, titled simply
Religion—a volume on the state of the art in the United States that was equally
concerned with persuading readers of the legitimacy of “‘new’ fields in the study
of religion” (as phrased by Philip Ashby in his essay on the “History of Religions”
[3]). It may hardly be coincidental, then, that the reinvention of the largely liberal,
Protestant study of religion as a legitimate humanistic discipline21 that contrib-
uted to the general well-being of the U.S. nation-state, happening as it was at a
host of separate sites for undoubtedly differing reasons, eventually trickled up
(or down) to the national, professional level. In 1967, the National Association of
Bible Instructors (NABI) was reconceived as the American Academy of Religion,
and the former’s Journal of Bible and Religion became the considerably broader and
more liberal Journal of the American Academy of Religion.22 Reading such events in
light of the significant funding opportunities that waited just around the corner, it
is difficult not to see these almost-simultaneous institutional changes in relation
to the rewards that awaited for those in the mid-1960s who were interested in
reconceptualizing the study of religion.
Even if the origins of this shift from the confessional to the humanistic (non-
sectarian) field lay in a host of other, deeper causes that long predated Sputnik,
without the perceived Soviet threat and the significant financial investment in
higher education that followed closely upon the heels of the satellite, coupled with
lawmakers wary about the public support of religion in an increasingly diverse
society where the onetime white and Protestant hegemony could no longer simply
be taken for granted, there would have been little practical benefit for investing
the sort of individual and institutional time and effort necessary over the coming
years to invent a new academic discipline. Although it may not have constituted
the sufficient cause or the infamous smoking gun, Sputnik and its direct fallout
in the United States might at least be understood as being one of the necessary
precursors not only of the “wired, wireless, and satellite-linked technologies of
everyday life in the twenty-first century” (Dickson 247), but also of the intellectual
field that we take for granted today and by which some of us earn our daily bread.
For good or ill, we are all direct beneficiaries of the Cold War rhetoric of crisis.
Given that many who attended that lecture at the University of Tennessee were
scholars hired in the 1960s and early 1970s, many of whom had been active in the
SVHE throughout their careers, we cannot help but speculate that this knowledge
might have had something to do with the obvious meaning of the lecturer’s refer-
ence to Sputnik.
Whether or not the early field was comprised of young, eager Cold Warriors
intent on fighting the “godless Communists” with their deeply humane knowl-
edge and keys to civilization (we think here specifically of Mircea Eliade’s “new
humanism”), it was at least largely comprised of disillusioned liberal Protestant
scholars who, although no longer part of a comfortable hegemony, nonetheless
possessed sufficiently cunning intelligence to take full advantage of a brief but
significant window of opportunity to create a new field with new jobs and, along
the way, set the agenda that would shape the discipline for the coming generations
(e.g., the continued dominance of the seminary model in religious studies depart-
ments). Even if we wish to suspend the cynicism that drives this analysis and,
instead, simply attribute our field’s origins to the growing interest throughout the
1960s in “things Asian,” we would be hard-pressed to enshrine these interests in
the ethereal realm of merely disembodied curiosities, hermetically sealed off from
U.S. foreign policy in Asia and changes in U.S. immigration laws (e.g., the U.S.
Immigration Act of 1965, which shifted the priority from European to Asian immi-
grants). However, if we let our cynicism run freely, then we might imagine liberal
scholars of religion from two generations ago remarking, as Major General John
B. Medaris once quipped several years after Sputnik’s launch, “If I could get hold
of that thing, I would kiss it on both cheeks” (quoted in Dickson 223).23 Simply put,
Sputnik was good for all sorts of businesses.
To demonstrate a strong link between the establishment of the humanistic
study of religion in the United States and its Cold War funding context will, of
course, require far more research than we provide here. Additional issues include
whether the rate of NDF awards to the study of religion rebounded over the course
of the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and whether this can be directly linked to the
fact that there no longer appeared to be a vague relationship between confes-
sional theology and the study of religion; to what extent funds from such public
and private sources that were explicitly aimed to promote democracy and address
what President Dwight Eisenhower’s “National Day of Prayer” Proclamation of
1958 phrased as the “unprecedented changes and challenges by an aggressive
denial of Divine Providence” (U.S. Statutes at Large 1958, Part 2: Proclamation,
Aug. 1, 1958) were used to establish the structural setting in which scholars could
work to recover the irreducibly religious nature of human civilization; the degree
to which graduate students in the freshly constituted field of religious studies
were eligible for federal loans to pursue their studies; and the history of such
public funding initiatives as the Foreign Languages and Area Studies fellowships
(FLAS), as well as the Graduate Assistants in Areas of National Need (GAANN)
fellowship program, and the role each has played in making possible the mod-
ern field of history of religions (given its emphasis on fieldwork and language
abilities).
Finally, to return to a topic treated only briefly at the outset of this chapter,
it will also be necessary to investigate the specific involvement of a host of pri-
vate funding agencies that might have directly contributed to the movement of
religious studies departments into the humanities curriculum. Dating from the
early 1960s, funding from the Danforth Foundation was routinely awarded to
public universities to pay a portion of the salary and benefits of a department
chair for a new department of religious studies for up to three years.24 Founded
in 1927, the Foundation’s mission, as described in its annual report for 1958,
was as follows:
The Danforth Foundation desires to be recognized as an educational foun-

dation interested in all that touches American education, and with special
interest in the legitimate and rightful place of the religious dimensions
within the academic experience.25
With the generally liberal notion of “religious dimensions” in mind, initial research
has revealed some interesting funding: In its annual report for the 1962 fiscal year,
the Danforth Foundation noted that it continued its “modest program” of special
grants for the establishment of new departments of religion.
This effort consists in the willingness to defray one-half the cost of a new
department in any type of undergraduate college, including tax-supported
institutions, for a period of three years, on condition that the full support
of the department will thereafter be guaranteed. (1958: 3)26
Citing the Foundation’s longtime “concern for values,” the 1962 report alone item-
izes grants to “aid in establishing a Department of Religion” at Barnard College
(the final payment of $4,000, for a total of $20,000); Gallaudet College (the second
[$3,950] of three payments); the University of Iowa (the final payment of $13,333,
for a total of $40,000 “for expansion of graduate program of School of Religion”);
the Pacific School of Religion ($8,614 received as part of a $24,000 grant to their
Program of Religion in Higher Education); Shepherd College (the second [$3,092]
of three payments); Stanford University (the final payment of $8,875, for a total
of $25,000 to “support Department of Religion”); and Temple University (the sec-
ond [$5,650] of three payments); and Whitman College ($7,080). That grants dur-
ing this time period were also awarded to humanities programs (e.g., Southern
Methodist University received $140,000 total in the early 1960s for a “program
of Graduate Council of the Humanities”) seems significant, especially given the
1964–1965 report, which, after observing that “[t]he values at the heart of liberal
education are rooted politically and socially in the Greco-Roman and Anglo-Saxon
heritage, and morally and religiously in the Hebrew-Christian tradition,” goes on
to note:
The need that public schools and colleges in a democracy be non-sectarian

has been interpreted to mean that they should also be secular, not merely
in the defensible sense of being independent of religious bodies but in the
unnecessary sense of being divorced from all religious interest. . . . [D]oes
religion as a subject for curricular study belong in the offerings of higher
education? This question, once widely debated, is now answered almost
unanimously in the affirmative; and even those tax-supported institutions
that long held back for fear, expediency, or simply a misapprehension about
the church-state issue, are now introducing the discipline into their regular
courses of study. . . . It is the Foundation’s view that neither piety nor impi-
ety is a substitute for education’s giving proper place for the consideration
of non-sectarian religious views. (1964–1965: 20–21)
After placing great weight on the difference between sectarian and nonsectarian
religious views (a.k.a. humanistic scholarship on religion),27 the report then goes
on to name several additional programs that benefited from “its continuance of a
program of aid to institutions establishing new departments of religion, whereby
one-half of the salary of the chairman is provided for a period of three years”: the
Dayton campus of the Miami and Ohio State Universities; Florida State University;
and Pitzer College. A final grant is noted to the Society for Religion in Higher
Education “to establish a program of fellowships for teachers of Asian religions.”
Although considerable further research on private and public funding of
religious studies remains to be done,28 to our way of thinking it does not take a
conspiracy theorist to conclude that both the NDEA and the involvement of private
funding sources (funding contingent, in the case of the Danforth Foundation, on
the institution normalizing the new department within three years) constitute suf-
ficient evidence of a direct link between “the entry of religious studies into the cur-
riculum of college and universities in North America in the 1960s” (as phrased by
Wiebe) and “the heady days of academics” (Dow 4) in the period immediately fol-
lowing the launch of Sputnik. Demonstrating the specifics of this direct, structural
linkage and the ways in which these funds created “opportunities for research
[and] . . . stimulat[ed] relations among scholars” (Holbrook 270)—whether such
research, journals, conferences, and professional associations were impacted “to
any great degree” or to any degree whatsoever—will, as Wiebe phrases it, “have
to await another occasion” (284, n. 10). Our hope is that the evidence we have
provided warrants just such another occasion—an occasion at which others might
deepen or extend the argument that the most mundane of factors created the nec-
essary conditions for thinking religion into social existence—for, giving the last
word to Holbrook, “only the remarkably unperceptive would imagine that prob-
lems such as these could be treated without confrontation at last with the fateful
question of financial support for religion scholarship” (270).
5
Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in

the Storms of Culture?
1.
the publication of Ann Taves’s book, Religious Experience Reconsidered (2009),
provided us with an opportunity to comment a little more explicitly than in
some other chapters on the synthesis of two aspects of our field, one quite old
and the other rather new. The first is the common practice—at least since the
Pietist-affiliated writers first appeared on the scene, but perhaps going back even
further—of using the category “religious experience” to name what was assumed
to be the unseen-yet-uniform causal force that inspired the various empirical
things that scholars of religion study (what amounts to the old essence/mani-
festation distinction); the second is the far more recent application to our field of
findings from that collection of disciplines now known as the cognitive sciences—
applied, at first, to those behavioral practices classed as ritual (e.g., McCauley and
Lawson’s agenda-setting work [1990, 2002]), but now used to explain the persis-
tence (i.e., not necessarily the actual origins so much as the successful transmis-
sion) of certain sorts of beliefs (e.g., in gods, ancestors, the afterlife, etc.).1 Finding
these two seemingly contradictory research traditions in the same book—contra-
dictory inasmuch as one assumes an irreducibly private sentiment residing out-
side the historical world, while the other is concerned with explaining our object
of study in a rigorously naturalistic manner—is unusual and thus something
worth considering.2
This coupling of mundane theories with a unique datum is worth considering
because, in our reading of cognitive scientists of religion, the provocative gains
that they announce (i.e., to have finally explained religion [e.g., Boyer 2001]) strike
us as being based on surprisingly conservative assumptions, all of which lead to
familiar and, for us, disappointing conclusions. To begin to demonstrate this, let’s
consider a talk given in the spring of 2010 at the University of Alabama’s depart-
ment of religious studies by one of its former undergraduate students, now pur-
suing graduate work in the cognitive science of religion (or what practitioners
refer to as CSR).3 The work was concerned with testing the theory, associated first
with Pascal Boyer and now with Justin Barrett (e.g., Gregory and Barrett 2009),
that certain ideas, if they differ in some small regard from what is assumed to be
a trans-human stock of hardwired, intuitive knowledge, will be more likely to be
remembered and thus hold a competitive advantage when it comes time to pass
them along to the next generation (the assumption being that the persistence
and widespread nature of beliefs in beings who are like us but also, for instance,
immortal or immaterial might be explained by means of this theory.) Apart from
suggesting that minimally counterintuitive ideas seem no more catchy (to pick up
on Dan Sperber’s now widely used epidemiological metaphor [1996]) than other
sorts of ideas, the student’s presentation made evident the difficulty (some might
say impossibility) of trying to study a presumably necessary, universal, and thus
presocial human trait by means of such historically shifting cultural constructs as
language (e.g., the above-used computer-based metaphor “hardwired”).4
Here is a case in point: Read the minimally counterintuitive phrase “A rock
that is sick” that was part of the questionnaire (or what those in the field might
call the stimulus) presented to a group of test subjects by the student, in hopes,
we presume, that the odd meaning conveyed by such a phrase would be more
memorable than the test’s more mundane meanings and phrases (i.e., those that
confirmed the folk epistemology of the test subjects, such as the seemingly uncon-
troversial “A girl that is wise”). What was most interesting, however, was that the
sick rock prompted one of the other students in attendance to jokingly agree that,
yes indeed, the rock was cool.5 What is our point in citing this presentation? Only
if we assume what some would regard as a rather conservative or at least very tra-
ditional correspondence theory of meaning (i.e., that words gain their meanings
by referring, in some sort of stable and direct relationship, with real things and
their actual qualities) could we hope, presumably along with those presenting test
subjects with such a stimulus, for “A rock that is sick” to elicit something like the
following chain of premises and inferences in a hypothetical test subject’s mind:
1. All empirical items can be divided between organic and inorganic;

2. All organic items can be further subdivided between animate and inanimate;
3. Poorly functioning animate organic items can be termed sick;
4. Only animate organic things can be sick;
5. All rocks are inorganic;
6. Therefore, rocks cannot be sick.
Only by assuming these premises to be intuitive and thus naturally linked could
we attribute the ability to remember “A rock that is sick” to its supposed coun-
terintuitiveness. But the moment that we abandon the correspondence theory
of meaning, the moment that we view language as a culturally relative and his-
torically dynamic closed system in which each signifier is made meaningful by
Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture? 93
its arbitrary and infinitely variable relationship to all other signifiers within the
system—such as coming to see “sick” as signifying “rad” or “wicked” or possibly
associating “sick rock” with a genre of music that is “sweet” and “tight”—the theo-
rist is back to square one, having no idea why the memory of the rock stuck out,6
if indeed it is even recalled with any more frequency than the other test sentences
(which, according to this former student, it is not).7 If, of course, you have not
controlled for the almost infinite malleability of the medium through which you
are trying to study hypothetically transcultural universals (and how, precisely, does
one control for that?) and instead have drawn conclusions about the universal only
because you have pursued such experiments within a socially, and thus semanti-
cally, homogenous audience (in which sick just means sick), then your survey
results will simply indicate the degree to which a collection of signifiers is used
in the accustomed way within your test population and will not necessarily tell
you anything about a basic feature of presocial cognition or, for that matter, how
the custom came about—an experimental design flaw akin to the once-common
ethnographic practice of drawing conclusions about an entire group after inter-
viewing only its leaders.8
2.
We thus come to a question that, despite how cognitivists proceed with their work,
has hardly been settled: Is language a neutral medium that conveys meanings
about things that exist outside of language (such as sick rocks or how human
cognition works), or is language itself constitutive of the worlds in which we live
(and in which we do our cogitating)? The point that we wish to emphasize is that
one does not have to be a Derridean deconstructionist to be a little more cautious
about deciding this issue than cognitivists have been so far. Eager to find the root
of religion in the mind/brain—which, it appears, will then comprise the ultimate
naturalistic reduction of religion—they have failed to ask questions concerning
the apparent ease of moving from part to whole, from contingent to necessary,
from history to ahistory, from local to universal, and from culture to nature. Our
concern is that scholars applying the findings from such fields as cognitive and
evolutionary psychology to the study of religion have failed to investigate these
sorts of questions—a failure that, in our estimation, undermines the identifica-
tion of their work as rigorously historical and scientific.
This failure is perhaps most evident in how such work adopts a culturally
and historically local nomenclature (i.e., the ability to judge that this is religion
and that is not) and then dehistoricizes and normalizes this classification system
inasmuch as the ability to be religious is then assumed to be a natural and thus
universal/eternal part of the human mind/brain.9 This naturalization of the cat-
egory of religion troubles us because we all know—or at least we thought that
we did—of the critiques of the category of religion as it was once used (we think
here of critiques of the notion of sui generis religion). We all know that none of
its possible Latin precursors likely meant what we mean by religion today (or at
least as we have commonly defined it for the past few hundred years). We also all
know that both this and the previous sentence’s first-person plural pronoun are
something that, for critically minded scholars, always needs attention, for it signi-
fies a rather precise group, originating in that part of the world commonly known
as Europe, whose members eventually perfected the use of the marker “religion”
to name a seemingly distinct domain of diverse (though, to contemporary critics,
not necessarily inherently related) items of human activity and production. The
corollary to this should also be well known: People outside of Europe (and by
this we mean a Europe of fairly recent memory) were not spontaneously organiz-
ing themselves and their world in terms of what was and what was not religion
or religious10—not, that is, until imperialism’s advance guard (i.e., those who
are still colloquially known as explorers, traders, and yes, missionaries11) arrived
on distant shores and, quite understandably, tried to make sense of the strange
by means of a classification system that divided up and thereby managed the
so-called “new world” in a way that was entirely familiar to those arriving for the
first time.
As we said, our hope is that it would be difficult to find a contemporary scholar
in our field not familiar, at least to some extent, with the work done in this area
over the last 20 or 30 years (reviewed at slightly greater length in chapter 6)—work
originally aimed at critiquing the notion of irreducible and thus unexplainable
religion but which easily applies to all uses of the category (when the category
is presumed to name a permanent trait of the human).12 But despite this critical
turn away from seeing our object of study as somehow being a special case, we
now find a thriving naturalistic industry developing a unique theory to discover
the unique place in the brain or in the genome or in a collection of cognitive pro-
cesses where the uniquely religious resides. The once-and-still popular “religious
experience” has, however, now been replaced by Taves with a seemingly more
inclusive, preferred term: “special experiences” or, to be more accurate, experi-
ences considered or deemed special. But what is a special experience? To begin
with, they are something other than ordinary experiences—they’re “unusual sorts
of experiences” (xv) and “singular experiences” (10). Despite the reconsidered
nomenclature, the unusual experiences that Taves brings to her readers’ atten-
tion are, of course, the usual suspects, as they still fall within a family resem-
blance domain familiar to anyone acquainted with the study of those experiences
formerly known as religious, those that “people sometimes ascribe . . . to things
that we (as scholars) associate with terms such as ‘religious,’ ‘magical,’ ‘mystical,’
‘spiritual,’ et cetera” (8). So, despite the change in name, it is not clear that the
data have been all that reconsidered—we still end up finding people the world
over who see “religion-like” things as like. The common (common to a particular
“us,” that is) limits of the folk taxon “religion,” naming a distinct domain, are
here reproduced; once again, then, a local and therefore familiar folk discourse
has simply been adopted by scholars and uncritically elevated to the analytic level,
and then used by them as if it described actual states of affairs in the world that
needed to be explained.
For some time, we have been perplexed by how willing many serious, suppos-
edly scientific scholars are to adopt an untheorized folk taxon, as if a classification
used by a group whom we happen to study (and, in many cases, of which we hap-
pen to be members ourselves) somehow corresponds to an actual aspect of reality
that ought to be studied.13 After all, all groups of humans have complex, local taxo-
nomic systems that they use to signify, classify, and thereby sort their worlds, yet
scholars do not necessarily conceive of each of them as universal properties of the
human mind. To take but one, rather silly, example, there is no academic study of
nerds despite the fact that this is a recognizable taxon to most North Americans,
one that is put to good and regular use, especially by children and teens. Or, closer
to our academic home, and recalling Pascal Boyer’s The Naturalness of Religious
Ideas (1994), we wonder what scholars in North America would make of a book
originating from, say, a contemporary Polynesian author that argued that mana
was a natural part of the panhuman cognition and not simply a local term that is
merely of ethnographic curiosity to non-Polynesians—a book that described and
then explained the mana-like experiences that we all have, despite our lacking the
word in our own vocabulary.
This, of course, will strike most scholars as just silly, because we of course
know that “their” concept of mana is but a curious, ethnographically local concept;
yet scholars who are themselves no less immersed in an ethnographically local
sociosemantic world routinely make claims such as the following, from the open-
ing lines to a handbook’s chapter on African religions (and already quoted in the
introduction):
If there is wisdom in starting with first things first, then a philosophical

discussion of African religions should start with an inquiry into the appli-
cability of the concept of religion to African life and thought. Not only is
the word “religion” not an African word . . ., it is doubtful whether there is
a single-word or even periphrastic translation of the word in any African
language. This does not mean, of course, that the phenomenon itself does
not exist among Africans. One may have something without being given
to talking about it. [John S.] Mbiti himself, for example, maintains in his
African Religions and Philosophy that Africans are pre-eminently religious,
not even knowing how to live without religion. (Wiredu 1997: 34; cf. discus-
sion in chapter 2)
This is a perplexing, and thus frustrating, paragraph, for the historical specificity
that is offered in its opening sentences is quickly taken away by its close, in which
the limitations of actual languages are overcome by the presumed presence of a
cross-cultural universal that, despite being an element of language, somehow floats
free of it—“One may have something without being given to talking about it.” And
voilà, via the correspondence theory of language (i.e., language is secondary and
merely corresponds to prior, prelinguistic, and thus real things in the world), the
old essence/manifestation distinction has returned to the field. Just how it is that
the author knows us to have some particular thing even if we can’t quite put it into
words is, predictably, simply asserted and not argued or defended. Substituting
“taboo” or “dharma” for “religion” in this paragraph, and also “North American”
for “African,” makes evident just how intellectually troublesome this approach is.
But why is this not apparent to scholars who pride themselves on their historical
and scientific precision? Why is it that those of us who happen to originate from
a cultural/historical context in which “religion” is used to name an aspect of the
social world (and we do not just mean theologians or liberal humanists doing this
work, but also ardently reductionistic, naturalistic scholars14) continue to invest
time in developing a theory of religion as if this word names a stable, cross-cultural
reality that needs to be described and then demands explanation?
3.
To see some of the problems involved in such a research program, consider the
opening pages of Harvey Whitehouse’s well-received Modes of Religiosity (2004),
in which he devotes a section to “What is Religion?”15 After acknowledging that
“[t]he everyday meaning of the word ‘religion’ is not all that easy to pin down” he
argues that, despite “a range of exemplary features” often being called upon to
name something as religious, “[n]one of these features is necessary for the attribu-
tion of the label, but almost any combination is sufficient.” He therefore concludes
that this utterly vague and rather imprecise use of the folk term signals the need
to develop a scientific approach to the topic. But it does not strike us as the task
of scholarship to adopt and then systematize other people’s folk taxons—because
those folks just got it wrong or were sloppy, despite their having had a pretty good
intuition into a cross-cultural universal. Of course, we might wish to theorize why
some humans (hardly all) use “religion” to name aspects of their social world,
thereby studying the various ways in which the taxon (and its wider discourse) is
used and the practical effects of these uses (which amounts to developing a theory
as to why “religion,” and not religion, is so catchy). But then we will no longer be
studying religion, describing religion, or defining religion but, instead, studying
social actors who use the term, regardless of its definition, and the work to which
it gets put, just as we have attempted to do in chapters 3 and 4.
As with so many other scholars, however, Whitehouse’s work is premised on

the old, troublesome folk notion of religion: belief in superhuman agents and
the actions grouped around these beliefs. The trouble is this: Some of the people
whom we study say that superhuman agents exist, and that a collection of beliefs,
behaviors, and institutions relevant to these agents is somehow set apart from
other aspects of culture, making this set of items “religious.” But many of the
people we study do not talk, write, act, or organize in this way at all. Taking just
some of our research subjects’ word for this set-apartness (a move that is likely
linked to scholars feeling rather comfortable with a folk system in which they
have themselves been reared), scholars then busily set about accounting for the
existence of this distinct domain—after all, they develop theories of religion and
are not content to understand the thing that some of their research subjects call
religion to be sufficiently explained by a higher-order theory of something else
entirely, of which those things grouped together as religion are but ethnographi-
cally and historically local instances (that Bloch [2008] is pushing in this direc-
tion is, however, encouraging). What if, as suggested above, what attracted the
scholarly imagination was not the taken-for-granted distinctness of that grouping
of things some know as religion (thus requiring a specific theory to account for its
existence as a unique domain of human practice) but, instead, the practitioners’
compulsion to represent certain features of their social world as essentially inter-
connected and thus distinct, unique, set-apart, and, with a nod to Taves, special?
Then, we would work on developing not a theory of religion but, instead, a theory
of “religion”—a theory of the process of specialization (which, unlike religion,
may very well turn out to be among the cognitive processes Geertz refers to as “the
most fundamental aspects of human cognition” [2004: 385]).16 What is more, such
an approach would simply be a component of a far wider theory of social classifica-
tion/identity construction (in a word, a theory of signification, in the most general
sense of the term). If this was our approach, then those who study the things their
research subjects called religion would quickly understand themselves to be part
of a much larger study of how humans make and enforce meanings and identities
in the world—the most supposedly mundane and ordinary no less central to such
a study than any other, because the process of centralization itself is the object
of study. This would truly be a cross-disciplinary project, one affording none of
its contributors the pretense of having data that hold a special place. Moreover, it
strikes us that only such an approach would be truly scientific—if by “scientific”
we meant an approach that studies all emic reports equally and according to etic
procedures and interests, rather than one that elevates select emic terms or inter-
ests to etic status and thus legitimacy.
To rephrase: Because we can trace the history of “religion” and “religious expe-
rience” as items of discourse—and by this we mean, for example, a genealogical
study of the invention of religious experience as an agreed-upon subset of the
broader range of interior dispositions known as experiences—it is indeed odd to

find naturalistic scholars so confident that they will find precisely where this local
discursive construct resides in the brain of all human beings—past, present, and
future. This we find puzzling, for it could be persuasively argued that the only
reason scholars find religion everywhere in the world, and religious experiences
in everyone’s heads, is because those very scholars approach the world—in fact,
make their world—by using this term, defined broadly enough as to always find
sufficient things that they can deem/group together as religion—suggesting to us
that theories of deeming (i.e., a theory of signification) and grouping (i.e., a theory
of classification) are far more required than a theory of religion. For example,
because so many scholars today understand “magic” or “cults” to no longer be ana-
lytically useful (inasmuch as they are linked to either bygone concerns or trouble-
some politics), a theory concerning why they were ever used (or continue to be
used by some) makes far more sense than trying to develop a new theory of magic
or a better theory of cults. Although we have some differences of opinion with
parts of his thesis (for example, see McCutcheon 2007a: 234–235; 2007b: 188, n.
12), this was what David Chidester did so nicely in his Savage Systems (1996): trace
the history not of religion but, instead, of the deployment of consecutive (and
generally ever-widening) definitions of religion, whereby an ever-greater number
of things people did and said on the colonial frontier got to count as religious and
therefore treated in a certain manner.
4.
To come at the problem from another direction: Just because we find people who
self-identify as citizens all over the world does not mean that there is a neces-
sary, evolutionary, cognitive basis to citizenship or the nation-state. The very
precise mode of social membership signaled by the concept of “citizen” is only
as recent (and as successful) as the rise (and the unchecked coercive power) of
the nation-state—one of the many ways in which human beings have organized
social life. Or, to call on a more timely and, for some, emotionally potent example,
because we know that there is no agreed-upon definition of “terrorism” (i.e., the
last time we checked, the UN had no such definition, and, as we all know, one
group’s freedom fighter is likely its opponent’s terrorist), it would be far from sen-
sible to look for a gene or a cognitive trigger that makes one a terrorist. Or because
legislatures all over the world define what counts as a crime and then, when it
suits the majority or the powerful (not necessarily overlapping groups), redefine it,
looking for a neurobiological basis for criminality would be downright silly, right?
But—and this is the interesting thing that deserves our attention—given how high
the stakes are in normalizing and thereby regulating competing forms of human
behavior, such fields do indeed exist—fields of study that naturalize and, in doing
so, substantialize what others would simply “deem” as culturally produced (and
perhaps even class-relevant) concepts and identities.17 But in the face of the almost
infinitely variable ways in which those things we call terrorism or criminality get
defined, nailing down a definition will, we conjecture, meet with as much success
as the effort to ensure that we always mean just one thing by “sick.”
But if our object of study, such as terrorism or crime, is a product of classifica-
tion systems and choices driven by specific sets of social interests (i.e., making
both terrorism and crime discursive objects and not natural facts), then it makes
sense that one would have great difficulty discovering some trait “in the bones”
that identified one as either a terrorist or a criminal. In support of this, consider
one of the conclusions of the following 1999 report commissioned by the Federal
Research Division of the U.S. Library of Congress:
In addition to having normal personalities and not being diagnosably men-

tally disturbed, a terrorist’s other characteristics make him or her practi-
cally indistinguishable from normal people, at least in terms of outward
appearance. (Hudson 1999: 61)
Indeed, for it would not be difficult to argue that what makes the so-called abnor-
mal terrorist distinguishable from, say, the normal freedom fighter is (despite the
above quote’s insinuation of some invisible inner intention) the definition that is
or is not applied to the act, not the inherent traits of the act or the social actor so
named. Identity, we would therefore argue, is a social attribution, a choice and an
act, even a social imposition, and not an interior disposition that is first felt and then
given an “outward appearance.”
Of course, if one were seeking to authorize one among many definitions, and
thereby legitimize the interests that it supported, then being able to lodge the
product of that definition in the very fabric of some person’s cognition and genes
would be a pretty handy device. And, like controlling for all of the definitions
of the signifier “sick” in order to normalize one and only one way of using the
term, such scholars would likely have to develop ways to control the variability of
social interests and language to find a secure biological home for those otherwise
immaterial discursive objects. Take, for example, this attempt to find a neuro-
biological basis to behavior understood as violent. But, you ask, what counts as
violence?
For the purpose of this review, violent behavior is defined as overt and
intentional physically aggressive behavior against another person.
Examples include beating, kicking, choking, pushing, grabbing, throwing
objects, using a weapon, threatening to use a weapon, and forcing sex. The
definition does not include aggression against self. Violent crimes include
murder, robbery, assault, and rape. In this review, I will not deal with orga-
nized state violence or ethnic warfare. (Volavka 1999; see also 2002: 2)
Although we would imagine that violence could be defined as a far wider, and thus
far more complex, thing than simply intentional, individual aggression coupled
with low self-control (curiously, professional football linebackers, boxers, and hunt-
ers escaped the scholar’s net, and why not include war, suicide, genocide, or police
violence?), such a narrow definition makes good analytical sense, for it produces a
nicely manageable discursive object that can be tackled and seemingly controlled
with a small set of tools. What’s more, the result of such work is an object that
mirrors the taken-for-granted assumptions about the world that we had before
embarking on the analysis. Authors count on readers to not recognize the oddly
self-serving nature of their work, of course. For instance, only because they already
“know” what counts as terrorism will most readers see no problem with a New
York Times reviewer making the following claim in a review on recent works on
“the terrorist mind”: “Despite the lack of a single terrorist profile, researchers have
largely agreed on the risk factors for involvement” (Kershaw 2010). Translation:
We don’t really know what it is, but we nonetheless know how you become one.
In this one sentence, moving as it does from indecision to utter conviction, we see
how easily a discursive object can be treated as a stable fact.
5.
And this is the problem with the neurobiological approach—it takes what some
of us understand to be a variable (i.e., historical, contingent, local, etc.) discursive
object as a settled matter of eternal biological fact (i.e., ahistorical, necessary, uni-
versal, etc.), thereby interiorizing, medicalizing, and thus normalizing what, some
of us would argue, is a contestable and always ongoing social, discursive event
(i.e., not religion but, instead, the very act and implications of naming, treating,
etc., this or that as religion18). This is a point nicely made by Jeff Ferrell, a profes-
sor of sociology at Texas Christian University and editor of the NYU Press series
Alternative Criminology. The discipline of criminology’s goal, as he understands it,
has been to explain that what societies take to be criminal behavior is constructed
out of historical and cultural forces. However, he writes, the newly emerging sub-
field of biocriminology, by looking inside human bodies rather than at the inher-
ent ambiguity of crime’s social context, “strikes me as misguided at a minimum, if
not morally and politically questionable” (cited in Monaghan 2009).
It is on this note that we return to the topic of a cognitive (or any other, for
that matter) theory of either religion or religious experience: Looking for the pan-
human, presocial constraints that make people religious is evidence of a failure
far more general than simply infecting the field with theological assumptions,
as Wiebe has argued (1984: 421). Instead, it marks a basic methodological failure
to thoroughly historicize our object of study (i.e., the means by which we create
objects of study in the first place), because it amounts to taking but one local,
recently developed folk classification system and universalizing it by finding (or,
better put, placing) it in all people’s hearts and minds, as the old saying goes.
In uncritically accepting and then using the category and all that comes with it,
such supposedly theoretical work is but a more nuanced application of the partici-
pant’s own manner of seeing the world, indicating that we have yet to realize the
dream of a scientific basis to the field. We have yet to move beyond description to
theory—theory not of religion but of “religion”!
That scholars’ ability to find religion all over the world is a product of our folk
classification system, and that we are very comfortable living in the world that its
use helps to make possible should not prevent us from recognizing this system’s
history, its utility, and also the limits of this way of grouping together and nam-
ing the items of the world. Failing to do so and instead naturalizing this item of
discourse—whether we say we study religion, religions, or special religion-like
experiences—marks a failure of critical intelligence that allows that pesky old
notion of sui generis religion to re-enter our field, this time through a new, bio-
logical back door.
6
Maps of Nothing in Particular:

Religion as a Cross-cultural Taxon
religious studies as a discipline, or even as just a coherent area of study, requires

not only that “religion” be capable of some kind of reasonable definition, but that it
correspond to a specific set of entities that are, in some fashion, worth demarcating
for some intellectual purpose. The need to define and defend an academic subject
matter creates a pressure to fabricate religion as an autonomous and more or less
“natural” or universal aspect of human existence (see, e.g., Masuzawa 2005: 316–
317; McCutcheon 1997b: 202). Nearly all modern theories of and approaches to
religion have therefore tended to take for granted the “given-ness” and the cultural
universality of religion, even when, as with, for example, Karl Marx or Sigmund
Freud, religious phenomena are reduced to aspects of other (albeit universal)
human processes.1 Insofar as the dominant approach to religious studies today, at
least as it affects teaching and the organization of departments and professional
associations, remains phenomenological in its orientation, this tendency to reify
our subject matter is greatly exacerbated, and the purpose of study is imagined to
be understanding religion as irreducibly religious.
But there has been an increasing dis-ease with religion as a term and a cat-
egory for decades, beginning almost 50 years ago with the demurrals of Wilfred
Cantwell Smith (1962) and gathering increasing momentum in the more than
30 years since the publication of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion (1982).
Since that time, a number of scholars have, in a variety of different and often
incompatible ways, questioned the cogency, validity, or utility of “religion” as a
concept (e.g., Asad 1993; Dubuisson 2003; Fitzgerald 2000, 2007a; McCutcheon
2003). Such is the present mood that Stanley Stowers (2008: 434) asserts that
“the rhetoric of despair about ‘religion as an object of study’ has become nearly
hysterical.”2 The “despair” that Stowers evokes merits examination: There does
seem to be something odd, something misleading or problematic, about religion
as a category. As a prominent stream within recent scholarship has insisted, the
idea of religion as a bounded entity and a natural type may not only represent an
Maps of Nothing in Particular: Religion as a Cross-cultural Taxon 103
imposition on non-Western and nonmodern cultures, an imposition that could be

tolerated if it bore intellectual fruit (because all knowledge results from importing
alien interests and categories producing gains that result from unexpected com-
parisons); in addition, it may be an analytically incoherent concept, a notion that
inhibits, rather than facilitates, our understanding of those phenomena to which
we opt to apply it. For a variety of different reasons, religion may turn out to be an
unhelpful scholarly, academic, and analytic category.
The Two Smiths

Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s dis-ease about religion as a term, spelled out in 1962,
represents in many ways the limits of phenomenology, the phenomenological
approach’s pursuit to its ultimate conclusions. Cantwell Smith takes seriously the
phenomenological dictum that religion must be handled in the terms in which it
presents itself (see, e.g., W. C. Smith 1962: 154–155). He likewise adopts the phe-
nomenological viewpoint that observable religious data are but historically varia-
ble expressions (e.g., 1962: 155) of the underlying force that motivates them, that
is, a faith in and relationship to deity (e.g. 1962: 114–117): “A lively faith involves
a limpid sincerity of relationship to one’s fellow men, and to oneself, and to
the Creator or ground or totality of the universe. For these things the formali-
ties of one’s religious tradition are at best a channel, and at worst a substitute”
(1962: 117). Cantwell Smith also claims that religion as a concept is a culturally
bounded notion specific to Christianity and Islam (W. C. Smith 1962: 110–114) and
that the term “religion” and, even more so, the names (and ideas) of individual
“religions” (i.e., Islam, Buddhism, Christianity) reify and make monolithic what
are in fact extremely complex and historically changeable phenomena. These lat-
ter two claims are not especially helpful (see the discussion and critique in Asad
2001:220–222). Arguments such as these neglect the extent to which category
formation is (1) always (or nearly always) artificial and specific to a particular dis-
course and its aims and (2) always simplifying—that is its fundamental purpose.
To complain that “religion” simplifies what is complex (itself a rhetorically loaded
term) is to forget that the map is different from the territory (cf. the title of Smith
1978a); to complain that religion is an etic category (cf. also Fitzgerald 2007a, and
especially 2006) implies an approach to religious phenomena that is entirely lim-
ited to insider-approved description. Indeed, even if it could be shown (and we do
not think that it can) that all people in all periods distinguished interactions with
“superhuman” forces (see Spiro 1966; cf. Stowers 2008 and now Riesebrodt 2010)
from other types of activity, this in itself would not be sufficient to justify our use of
“religion” as a scholarly category, because such a panhuman distinction would still
need to be shown to be intellectually useful (cf. Martin 2009: 171). Most groups of
people, cross-culturally and transhistorically, have distinguished between insiders
(to the group) and outsiders, but this in itself need not underwrite a disciplinary
horizon of “outsider studies.”
It is, rather, Cantwell Smith’s observation that the locution diminishes the expe-
rience and claims of the practitioner, and it confuses the manifestation or phenom-
enon (religion) with the invisible essence (faith, deity), of which the phenomenon
is but the contingent shadow, that forms the substantive backbone of his critique
of religion as a term.3 Thus does phenomenology’s insistence on apprehending
its subject matter “as it presents itself” render that subject matter invisible and
impervious to investigation, as religion will not admit to being merely religion.4
This incongruity also reveals to some degree the tendentiousness of the idea of
religion, insofar as the very formulation of a datum as religious refers itself to,
and defines itself in terms of, commitments and claims to transcendence. This
represents little more than a value judgment. At the same time, Cantwell Smith’s
hesitancy manifests the ambivalence associated with the concept by the religious
themselves, insofar as the notion of religion is inadequate to the ineffable “reality”
to which it purportedly refers.5
Jonathan Z. Smith, more recently and with greater effect, has turned Cantwell
Smith’s arguments inside-out, preserving the insight that classifying phenomena
as religious involves a dimension of artificiality and even distortion, but defending
the taxon nonetheless. In a famous passage from his 1982 book Imagining Religion,
Jonathan Z. Smith agrees with Cantwell Smith that “religion” does not correspond
to something “really there” in the world, apart from our formulation of it:
But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centu-
ries in which to imagine religion. That is to say, while there is a stagger-
ing amount of data, phenomena, of human experiences and expressions
that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or
another, as religious—there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the
creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic pur-
poses by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion
has no existence apart from the academy. (J. Z. Smith 1982: xi)
Jonathan Z. Smith’s comments, deeply influential on our thinking on these topics,

represent an important effort to denaturalize the idea of religion. But Smith does
not draw the conclusion from this that religion as a category should be avoided,
cannot be defined, or must not be imposed on the data. Quite the contrary: If our
goal is to understand those data that we happen to designate as religious, such an
active mental process must, of necessity, involve a transformation and manipula-
tion of those data, classifying them according to our questions and our agenda,
rather than merely describing them as they appear to insiders. Cantwell Smith’s
observation that the religious individual would not recognize our characterizations
is, for Jonathan Z. Smith, not an argument against the concept’s utility, but an
argument for it (cf. Stowers 2008: 435).
In a variety of places, Smith uses the metaphor of a map to defend and even
actively promote the distorting effects of our efforts at classification and explana-
tion—just as a map’s utility consists precisely in its schematizing and condensing
the territory it represents in order to make that territory more cognitively appre-
hensible in particular ways, so also does scholarship necessarily do violence to the
data it translates: “[I]t is the very distance and difference of ‘religion’ as a second-
order category that gives it cognitive power” (J. Z. Smith 2004a: 208). Thus the
effect of denaturalization is not a repudiation of the concept, but rather increased
self-consciousness about what intellectual processes might be served by demarcat-
ing some data as religious. Cantwell Smith is thus found standing on his head and
is turned right-side up:6 “Religion” is not an insider category, but it is for that very
reason a valuable intellectual tool for reconfiguring data in intellectually construc-
tive ways.
“Religion” in Other Recent Work

Since the publication of Jonathan Z. Smith’s Imagining Religion more than
25 years ago, the idea that religion is not a universal, cross-cultural, or natural
category has proliferated widely. Many students of religion, however, perhaps
still the majority, continue to treat it as a given, and essentially self-evident,
cross-cultural universal—not only phenomenologists, but also those with more
recent and quite radical cognitive approaches to religion.7 But more and more
scholars are arguing that religion is a deeply problematic conception. It is, they
would argue, a culture-specific, historically fixed, and perhaps ideologically
loaded fabrication of more or less recent time, one that does not necessarily find
parallels in non-Western or nonmodern cultures. It taxonomizes the world in
ways that separate things other cultures associate, and associate things those cul-
tures separate (see Nye 2003: 12–18; cf. Dubuisson 2003: 112–115). More impor-
tantly, it may also be that this act of classification unwittingly separates things
whose association would provide analytical leverage and associates things in ways
that provide no explanatory advantage at all. In other words, religion could be a
polyphyletic category—a container that associates and confuses objects that range
across different types.8
In the field of anthropology, from which religious studies has traditionally
derived its most influential definitions of religion,9 sophisticated explorations of
religion as a culturally specific, recently fabricated, and perhaps misleading taxon
are currently being explored, especially in the work of Webb Keane (2007) and
Maurice Bloch (2008). Bloch argues that “anthropologists have, after countless
fruitless attempts, found it impossible to usefully and convincingly cross-culturally
isolate or define a distinct phenomenon that can analytically be labeled ‘religion’”

(Bloch 2008: 2055). Within religious studies as well as anthropology, Talal Asad’s
1993 challenge to modern assumptions about religion has proved very influential.
For Asad, the view of religion as distinctively personal-individual, interiorized, and
focused on sincerity of belief is a direct reflection of the modern invention of the
secular state:
. . . with the triumphant rise of modern science, modern production, and

the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distin-
guish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of
religion more and more onto the moods and motivations of the individual
believer. Discipline (intellectual and social) would, in this period, gradually
abandon religious space, letting “belief,” “conscience,” and “sensibility”
take its place. (Asad 1993: 39; cf. Asad 2003: 181–194; Keane 2007: 213–214;
McCutcheon 1997b: 127–157; and see chapter 1 in this volume)
To some degree, the lineage of “religion” as a taxon and the agenda behind its for-
mulation (and behind the construction of the academic study thereof) are what is
at issue in these more recent discussions. The problem is not merely that the cat-
egory of religion fails to “carve nature at the joints” (Plato, Phaedrus 265d–266a),
but rather that it carves our data in accord with some misleading, mischievous, or
at least nonacademic project. These more recent criticisms agree with Jonathan
Z. Smith that religion is a fabricated category, but they deny that it is primarily a
scholarly fabrication. For those who take this position, “religion” imposes on the
non-Western or premodern data normative, or political, or other social and discur-
sive undertakings alien to them, reads those endeavors into the data, and turns
that data into little more than a reflection of sociopolitical projects or conclusions
native to the European West.
The problem may simply rest in an ethnocentric misreading of our issues as
their issues, a problem not because it fails to take an insider viewpoint “seriously,”
but because it distorts the data in unhelpful ways. Daniel Dubuisson frames the
issue with admirable precision:
. . . has this notion [i.e., religion] nevertheless acquired, thanks to critical

studies conducted by the history of religions for more than a century, an
indisputable and rigorous definition, capable of aiding us in discovering
and understanding . . . anthropological invariables . . . or, on the contrary,
captive to its origins and history, has it instead remained a kind of native
concept, typically European, gathering and summarizing under its aegis
the struggles of a Western consciousness grappling with itself? (Dubuisson
2003: 5–6)
His own answer is that “. . . the human sciences (and among them the history of
religions) have frequently been content, often unknowingly, sometimes naively, at
other times arrogantly, consciously to revive a prejudice—and one of our dearest
native categories” (Dubuisson 2003: 115). Analogously, Daniel Boyarin, locating
the origin of the Western notion of religion in the Christianity of the patristic era,10
sees in it a potential Christian imposition on other cultures (i.e., a projection of
one religion’s own self-image as a religion onto those other datasets it chooses to
so designate)—in the case of Boyarin’s analysis (2008), Judaism. Similar claims
have been made for Hinduism (e.g., King 1999) and Buddhism (see Masuzawa
2005: 121–146), among others. If these views have merit, the primary vector for
what Jonathan Z. Smith (e.g., 1990: 34) decries as the importation of theological
discourses into the (supposed) analysis of religious data could be the notion of
religion itself.
“Religion” and Colonialism

More may be going on, however, than mere oblivious ethnocentrism. Some
scholars have argued that “religion” is used as a stalking horse for colonial
agenda, as is the identification of variegated national-ethnic traditions as reified
and single “religions” (the obvious example is “Hinduism”). Influenced by the
discourse-criticism of Michel Foucault and by postcolonial theorists such as
Edward Said, the very act of classification itself is seen as an act of power, an
imposition on native cultural patterns and types of knowledge (see, e.g., Nye
2003: 12–15). The fact that it is first the colonial administrator, and then second-
arily the western scholar, who gets to classify particular types of native discourse
as “religious” (or conversely as something else: “philosophical,” “legal,” “magi-
cal,” “terrorist,” and so on) or as manifestations of this and not that tradition is
critically important. This act of classification is itself a political activity, and one
particularly related to the colonial and imperial situation of a foreign power ren-
dering newly encountered societies digestible and manipulable in terms conge-
nial to its own culture and agenda.
According to such views, the very point of religious studies as a field may be
to process the data generated by the colonial project, in the course of which the
scholar is deeply implicated in the mechanisms of an imperial state. Such a view
of religion is nicely exemplified by Tomoko Masuzawa:
. . . “world religions” as a category and as a conceptual framework initially

developed in the European academy . . . [and] quickly became an effective
means of differentiating, variegating, consolidating, and totalizing a large
portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable among the
inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world. (Masuzawa 2005: 20)11
Likewise, Daniel Dubuisson sees something insidious involved in the application

of this native European category to outsiders: a mode of affirming our own sense
of superiority. Insofar as religion is a Western and European concept, it will find
its clearest and most developed manifestations in European avatars. As a result,
to universalize the category is to create a universal human quality or characteristic
that is, in fact, best manifested in the European person, hence marking that per-
son’s superiority. Dubuisson describes this process as leading to overt rationaliza-
tions for imperialism:
The majority of other religions were henceforth viewed as rough drafts,

archaic or primitive forms of our religion. The universal undeniably exists,
but at different stages of development. By having these religions succeed
one another along a single temporal axis, where the West clearly occupied
the terminal position, the differences that were observed lost all capacity
to subvert. . . . At a single stroke, imperialism and colonialism were equally
justified and even, with the impetus of missionary activity, received an
unanticipated moral guarantee. (Dubuisson 2003: 114–115)
Or again, Timothy Fitzgerald (e.g., 2000: 8) sees the creation of “religion” as a way
of sidelining and deprecating native traditions, while simultaneously naturalizing
the functioning of the modern Western state and economy.
According to such readings as these, the category religion and the choice to use
that category to make sense of data derived from other cultures represent not the
mapmaking of self-conscious scholarship, but at best the distorting and unselfcon-
scious imposition of native European categories onto cultures that do not share
the same organizational principles as European modernity, making those cultures
into little more than mirrors for our own prejudices and self-understandings. At
worst, it represents a deliberate and self-interested exercise of discursive power, an
imperial dissection of others’ cultures into manageable bits, and their relegation
to the irrelevant realm of the supernatural. At issue in much of the current discus-
sion then is not so much the artificiality of the category of religion as its implica-
tion in political agenda of questionable merit.
“Religion” and Modern Politics

Jonathan Z. Smith’s tracking of the terminology of “religion” from the early mod-
ern period to the present—in his 1998 article “Religion, Religions, Religious”—has
persuaded us that the animating conception of our field is a historically specific,
emic, product of the modern West. More precisely, as argued in chapters 1 and 3
and throughout this volume, religion is a folk category tied up with the develop-
ment of the modern state and the ways in which the modern state has defined
itself as secular (cf. also Asad 2001: 221; and see further chapter 7). That secular
state generates a shadow image of itself, a realm of collective voluntary commit-
ment rooted in (irrational, variable, and uncompelled) personal belief that the
state would not partake of or constrain.12 Thus religion is first and foremost a
political category, albeit an ambivalent one, with its apotropaic function of refer-
ring to qualities from which the state seeks to dissociate itself. This fundamentally
political identity is evidenced in the fact that the most consequential and effica-
cious definitions of religion are those of the state, embodied in the tax code and in
judicial decisions about what does and does not constitute a religious observance.
As Winnifred Sullivan has pointed out in her aptly entitled The Impossibility of
Religious Freedom (2005), the government itself defines the realm in which “reli-
gious freedom” is allowed to operate, thus making that “freedom” paradoxically
subject to the edict of the state.
Historically, our notion of religion is secondary to the development of states
that dissociated themselves from ecclesiastical institutions to the point of distin-
guishing citizenship independently of church affiliation. This process began in
the Reformation and culminated in the late-18th-century establishment of revolu-
tionary secular states in America (1776) and France (1789). The idea of religion as
a bounded, independent, distinguishable, and above all universal aspect of human
sociality is the product of a specifically Western history.
It is true of course that there are periods for which, and cultures in which,
concepts akin to our modern notion of religion do surface. Cantwell Smith,
while insisting on the modernity of “religion,” also regarded it as having been
invented earlier, in antiquity, by Christianity, a point that Talal Asad (2001: 221)
criticizes as assuming that ancient religion and modern religion are the same.
Daniel Boyarin (2008), as noted above, sees Christian expressions of identity
in late antiquity as revolving around types of allegiance to the divine, and thus
also attributes the “invention” of religion to Christians of the patristic period.
Likewise, a notion akin to religion might be discerned in any number of pre-
modern discussions of observances with respect to the gods or cults, such as
Cicero’s “de legibus” and “de natura deorum” or Plutarch’s “de superstitione.” But
it takes until the modern period for the notion of religion to be generalized. Only
in the last five centuries or so, and with increasing force in the last two hundred
years, has the liberal notion of the state as a negative entity developed, that is,
the belief that the role of the state is to protect individual self-expression, rather
than to constitute it. Religion is created as the shadow image, the denied other,
of that secular state, as the personal self-construction of an identity imagined as
distinct from national identity (see especially chapter 3); and this state of affairs
is naturalized and universalized as the common condition of the human race.
It is not until the institutionalized secular state established as semipermanent
religion’s condition of possibility that what we call “religion” was theorized as
an invariable and cross-cultural feature of human nature—a feature imagined as

deracinated, apolitical, and otherworldly.
This condition of religion’s possibility can be elaborated more precisely.
Maurice Bloch notes that those kinds of phenomena that we tend to categorize
as “religion” are in themselves little more than an arbitrary subset of representa-
tions of the social abstract, “a transcendental social consist[ing] of essentialized
roles and groups” (Bloch 2008: 2056). This set does not constitute a natural phy-
lum at all—it is intertwined with, and to be understood alongside and as func-
tionally identical to, other varying forms of imaginative social self-reference such
as nationalism,13 prejudice, kinship groupings, the invisible hand of the market,
Santa Claus, and so on. It is only on those occasions when some types of social
self-reference—the mythology and symbology of who we are—for one reason or
another come to be detached from the mechanisms and conception of the state,
whatever those may be, or come to be regarded as of limited applicability or ref-
erence within the social body, that the strange deracinated cultural signifier we
moderns call “religion” seems to rear its head. It is precisely for this reason that
we do encounter phenomena that look like our notion of religion long before the
invention of religion as an important modern taxon. At any time or in any place
in which for one reason or another the coercive state power is detached from
other types of social self-signification, we misrecognize those displaced fragments
of the social imaginary as a thing, that is, “religion.” Again, however, it is only
with the advent of the modern nation—in which the ecclesiastical frameworks
for expressing the social imaginary are expelled from the purview of the state,
and from state compulsion and discipline—that this distinction comes to be per-
manent and institutional, and hence comes to be generalized as a universal and
crucial category of human experience.
As a result of the Western invention of a form of state that deliberately dissoci-
ates itself from certain aspects of social identity,14 religion has come to be a central
cultural tool that we—modern, Western heirs to Reformation, Enlightenment,
revolution, and the secular nation-state—use to describe and make sense of our-
selves: our history, commitments, subjectivities, and identities, and (above all else)
our circumscribed political institutions as distinct from other types of social activ-
ity. Moreover, to quote Bloch again (2008: 2060), “the separation of religion from
the transcendental social in general is, even in the places where it appears at first
to exist, superficial and transient.”
The unstable and arbitrary historical accident that creates a sharp division
within the field of the social imaginary has thus generated a rather ambivalent
and incoherent conceptual tool, a category that gets justified, demarcated, and
defended in, at times, self-contradictory ways. Religion is identified with the quin-
tessence of the human self, the most ineffable interiority, the ultimate concern so
powerful as to be immune from criticism or coercion, and it is simultaneously
peripheralized as irrational, subject to individual and arbitrary choice, and posi-

tively ruled out of state activity and thus also ruled out of effective social potency. It
comes to refer to a realm of human desire that is simultaneously ideal and unreal;
in fact, the category as a category implicitly asserts that what is ideal is unreal, that
is, socially unrealizable. It is precisely for this reason that the religiously com-
mitted cannot concede that what they are doing is “religion,” as Cantwell Smith
noted. They are wary of the devil’s bargain that they are permitted complete free-
dom to pursue whatever “religious” practices and beliefs they wish,15 in exchange
for which they must assent to the cost of those practices and beliefs becoming
utterly irrelevant. The price of religious freedom appears to be eternal insignifi-
cance (see also chapter 3).
“Religion” and the Social Imaginary

This conclusion has ramifications for the role that the imposition of “religion” as
a discursive element might have had in European colonialism. In our view, the
readings of religion offered by Dubuisson, Fitzgerald, Richard King, and others,
in which the role of religion as more or less deliberately implicated in colonization
is foregrounded, may be a little bit overstated.16 The European West always had
contact with peoples of differing views and cultural practices: Muslims and Jews,
most obviously, but also pagan Europeans well into the Middle Ages (and beyond,
in epic literature and the like), the Classical pagans via history, literature, and phi-
losophy, and even (albeit more problematically) Christian heretics and apostates.
It is not as though Europe lived in a dreamland of borderless Christian totality, like
water in water, until the shocking discovery of Columbus that some people did not
believe in Jesus. Certainly overseas exploration contributed data and additional
impetus to develop categories with which to relate “their” practices to “ours,” but it
did not introduce the European awareness of religiocultural difference.
Nor again can the sometimes-romantic characterizations (often insider
self-representations offered in the interests of contestation with colonial pow-
ers) of pre-contact non-Europeans be sustained. It is not as though, prior to the
onslaught of Enlightenment disenchantment, all the world lived in an undifferen-
tiated cultural soup, a kind of unmediated, undivided integrity of spirit infusing
all of daily life. All cultures and all societies carve up the world, make distinctions,
and classify both objects and social practices, albeit in different ways.17 So it avails
us little—aside from producing a little shiver of moral horror and self-loathing—
to imagine the incursion of European conquistadors as a kind of Freudian trauma,
a radical shock to a body politic previously marked by primordial integration.
Besides being excessively romantic, such an argument against religion as a cate-
gory can (somewhat ironically) provide a high-minded rationalization for a return
to the phenomenological insistence on taking “religion” as it presents itself, that
is, as incomparable, transcendent, and ultimately unanalyzable. As Bruce Lincoln

insists, “When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which
they will be understood, [and] suspends one’s interest in the temporal and contin-
gent . . . one has ceased to function as [a] historian or scholar.”18
The European application of “religion” to societies first encountered in the mod-
ern period via voyages of exploration is probably not in the first instance a deliber-
ate effort to dominate but to understand. This involves the simple, if flawed, process
of Europeans somewhat naively applying their own (limited and culture-specific)
categories onto new data.19 The effect is ethnocentric and can be unhelpful; among
other things, such wholesale imposition of one’s own native categories can make
one blind to the strangenesses of the data, to the genuinely illuminating differences
between “us” and “them.” Moreover, it is certainly true that knowledge, manifested
in taxonomizing the novelties one encounters, does express a will to power. But
the main work being done with the category “religion” seems to concern European
subjectivity, states, and self-identity. The imposition of these self-images on others
(often in the deeply misleading form of “human nature,” on which, see Sahlins
2008), while distorting and even oppressive, is fundamentally a claim that those
others are in some important way “like us,” human (and hence understandable).
Such likeness was seriously open to question among explorers of the early mod-
ern period, and some in fact denied religion to “the natives,”20 a position that, as
Dubuisson notes (2003: 114), was openly dehumanizing. The use of religion as a
cross-cultural category implies by contrast that the other is not sheer incompre-
hensible difference.
In fact, if we tend to find “religion” in those places where the social imaginary
has been de-universalized or detached from the mechanisms of state, it is easy to
see why the imposition of colonial rule would bring with it a greater tendency to
identify religion among those colonized: The state power has been seized by out-
siders, but a persistent sense of “us” remains within the culture thus dominated.
In this sense, then, colonialism—Western or not—really does create “religion.” It
does so not simply or primarily by imposing a Western taxon on non-Western cul-
tures, but by creating a kind of ideological lacuna, a situation in which the social
body is divided against itself and imagined in a kind of bifurcated condition. The
disempowered side of that bifurcation will then look to us Western moderns like
what we call religion. The flaw or misconception at the heart of religion as a cate-
gory is thus probably not to be found primarily in its oppressive importation into
non-Western contexts by modern colonialism. Rather, the concept’s weakness
derives from its origins as a historically contingent political creation, rather than
a usefully analytic one, as well as the fact that the political agenda expressed in
the concept is self-contradictory, confused, and ambivalent, making the concept
itself enormously incoherent. In any given period or location, wherever the line
happens to have been drawn between the obligatory and the voluntary aspects
of a fragmented social imaginary, that is where, arbitrarily and provisionally, the

boundaries of a religion will be found. As Maurice Bloch vividly expresses it, “To
explain religion is therefore a fundamentally misguided enterprise. It is rather
like trying to explain the function of headlights while ignoring what motorcars
are . . . for. What needs to be explained is the nature of human sociability, and then
religion simply appears as an aspect of this that cannot stand alone” (Bloch 2008:
2060; and see chapter 1).
Conclusion
In sum then, we might conclude that Jonathan Z. Smith is at least partly wrong:
“Religion” is not a scholarly category or construct.21 Most scholarly efforts to
define religion have simply been efforts to identify the natural type to which this
Euro-Western folk category must surely refer.22 At the same time, though, Jonathan
Z. Smith is also partly right: We are trying to understand our data, and doing so
requires us to some degree to frame that data in terms of the categories that make
sense to us, even if in so doing we distort them or even offend those whom we
seek to understand. Self-critical reflection on the taxonomies of religious studies
should not become an excuse for resorting to simple repetition and description of
insider claims.
The value of “religion” as a taxon will not depend on its isometry with the data
it delineates and shapes. As Jonathan Z. Smith stresses, it is precisely the differ-
ence between analytic concepts and the self-presentation of the data that gives
those concepts explanatory force (e.g., J. Z. Smith 2004a: 208). Nor will its value
depend on the validity of its claims to universal applicability. Rather, it will hinge
on the capacity that the category might or might not continue to have to surprise,
clarify, and shape and transform our own organization of the human universe. If
“religion” as an idea forces upon us new and helpful understandings of familiar
data, if it leads to us juxtaposing phenomena we might not otherwise think to
compare, and if in the process it leads us continually to rectify the taxonomy from
which we started, then it serves a valuable intellectual purpose, even if it does not
refer to anything real. If, by contrast, the category does little more than provide
a justification for comparing things that we already imagine to be similar; if it
simply reinforces our prejudices; or if it turns foreign cultural data into evidence
for the naturalness and superiority of our own practices and assumptions, then it
is not simply intellectually unhelpful—it is positively pernicious. Which of these
judgments is closer to the truth remains, of course, a matter for debate. What is
important—and what is promising about the present conjuncture in the field of
religious studies—is that the question is being raised.
7
“They Licked the Platter Clean”:

On the Codependency of the Religious
and the Secular
A good part of the human predicament is always to be unaware

of the mind’s own generative powers and to be limited by concepts
of the mind’s own fashioning.
(Douglas 1999: xv)
the day after he was fired in early November 2006, the U.S. Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld had the following to say about the Iraq war:
I will say this—it is very clear that the major combat operations were an
enormous success. . . . It’s clear that in Phase 2 of this, it has not been going
well enough or fast enough. (MSNBC 2006)
What is fascinating about this quote is the manner in which Rumsfeld took what
some thought of simply as a war and divided it between major and minor opera-
tions, thereby distinguishing between phases one and two and making it into two
separate things that, once conceived of as distinct from each other, could be treated
differently—one a victory and the other a nagging problem. As another example
of this strategy, consider Dov Zakheim—a former chief financial officer who once
worked for Rumsfeld at the Pentagon—who had the following to say about the war:
People will debate the second part, the second phase of what happened in
Iraq. Very few are arguing that the military victory in the first phase was any-
thing but an outright success. (Danner 2006: 82; emphasis added)1
Despite criticisms that it was overly optimistic to hang a “mission accomplished”

banner behind President Bush during his speech from the deck of an aircraft
“They Licked the Platter Clean” 115
carrier back in 2003, this handy distinction makes it possible to proclaim that the
mission was indeed accomplished—and that it was done so within only a few weeks
and with very few U.S. deaths. All that is left, as they might say, is the mopping
up. Of course, the fact that phase two’s cleanup was still going on in late October
of 2011 when President Obama announced the troop withdrawal does not detract
from the unequivocal success of phase one.
What is our point? Classification matters! Or, to put it a little more bluntly, one
might say divide et impera, because “divide and rule” aptly describes the manner in
which the designators “phase one” and “phase two” enabled those on the political
right, commonly known in the United States as foreign policy hawks, to set the terms
of the debate by silencing those who opposed their plans. To claims that the United
States is losing the war, they might reply, “What do you mean? We won it years ago!”
But before we rush to criticize those on the right, we likely ought to recognize that
this strategic differentiation has uses all along the spectrum of practical interests,
because even those on the left (i.e., the so-called doves) make use of this same handy
device: “Yes, we won the war,” they might say, “but through mismanagement and
lack of planning, we lost the peace” (e.g., Allawi 2007). One could characterize this
as the friendly face of U.S. nationalism, for distinguishing between the war’s various
phases allows the doves to, as the old saying goes, have their cake and eat it too: They
can now criticize the Bush administration’s handling of the war while yet agreeing on
the right of the United States to use pre-emptive, coercive violence to universalize its
local interests—it’s just that they differ on when, where, and how to do it.
With a deferential nod to Michel Foucault’s thoughts on the interconnected
nature of knowledge and power, we might therefore say that, instead of being a neu-
tral act of passive recognition, practical interests motivate the act of distinguishing
a “this” from a “that.” To illustrate this point further, consider another timely exam-
ple: As part of their effort to oppose President George W. Bush’s post-reelection
“troop surge” in Iraq, Democrats quickly renamed it an “escalation”—a term that,
for many Americans, still carries with it a powerful antiwar connotation acquired
during debates over the Vietnam War, suggesting the waste of sending more young
lives to die after those already lost. And, as might be expected, the White House
was quick to reply; the U.S. secretary of state at the time, Condoleezza Rice, soon
renamed it yet again—this time calling it an “augmentation.”2 Though perhaps
subtle, the distinctions are important: Ask any plastic surgeon who does breast
implants, and he or she will indicate that an augmentation merely enhances what
one already has—putting your best foot forward, as they say. Phase one and phase
two; surge, escalation, and augmentation—social interests are encoded in these
terms, their use helping to make it possible to conceive, promote, or even contest
different attachments, all depending on the manner in which one wishes to name,
divide up, and thereby organize the generic world of human doings.
If these politically charged opening examples leave the impression that all
we’re dealing with is mere jargon, then consider the work of the anthropologist
Brian Spooner (1986) who, in an article on the authenticity of Oriental carpets,

argued that ad hoc criteria, fueled by the social and material interests of carpet
dealers (and not weavers), were invented and applied to regulate a rug’s exchange
value. But perhaps the most important part of his argument is that such regulatory
mechanisms as criteria for authenticity, and the so-called experts to implement
them, were devised only after the Industrial Revolution made possible the mass
production of carpets. Spooner therefore concludes that, prior to that time, there
was no such thing in the world as an “authentic Oriental carpet.” That is, prior to
the development and use of criteria driven by newly emergent practical interests,
there was no reason and thus no way to distinguish the genuine article from a
cheap imitation. Instead, a wide variety of locally woven floor coverings, traced
to a part of the world once known as Persia, were either used by those who made
them or considered family heirlooms destined for a dowry or saved for that rainy
day when they could be locally traded for other goods.
Spooner’s analysis nicely demonstrates that distinctions—in this case between
authentic and fake, pristine original and degraded copy—are elements of econo-
mies of signification (borrowing an apt phrase from Jonathan Z. Smith). In the
case of Oriental carpets, it is an economy with a dramatic increase in supply that
was made possible by technological innovation. Criteria of authenticity, we see,
therefore function like a trade tariff, helping to protect investments (i.e., by regu-
lating such things as value, authority, and prestige) by governing an otherwise
competitive system of exchange; after all, if we were dealing in such carpets, we
would undoubtedly be concerned about any old rug being equally valued to those
we brought to market. We also see that, if there is no such thing in the realm of
empirical objects as an authentic Oriental carpet, then all we have to study are peo-
ple putting their contestable preferences into practice by means of classification
systems that, when policed with sufficient muscle, turn a mere rug into something
on which you would not dare walk. Classification, then, is hardly mere jargon, and
neither is it simply the passive recognition of already-existing values and identi-
ties. Instead, it is evidence of both prior interests and future consequences.
Moving from carpets to people, from managing value to managing identity,
we arrive at one of the premises of the social theory that we bring to the study of
religion’s relation to the political, as well as the sacred’s relation to the secular: It is
only in response to previously unknown difference, and by means of the conven-
tions that we concoct and that suit our purposes, that people attempt to exert some
control over the unwieldy economies of social affinity and estrangement (borrow-
ing terms from Bruce Lincoln) in which they happen to find themselves. Prior to
some unanticipated social change, such systems of management (e.g., criteria for
group membership) were unimagined because they were not required. And the
concocted convention that attracts our attention is the very pairing of religion with
the political, the sacred with the secular.
As an initial example of this, consider the case of what Bruce Lincoln refers
to as a “minor skirmish” in 1930s Swaziland between local leaders and British
colonial administrators. Quoting the account by the Africanist Hilda Kuper (1947:
103–104), Lincoln describes how the British plan to build an airstrip on Swazi
territory was thwarted by Sobhuza II, the Swazi king (1899–1982). As phrased by
Kuper, the Swazi people resented the idea of sacrificing some of their own land for
such a landing strip: “Why Native Areas and not a European farm? [they asked].
Who would benefit from a ‘fly-machine’? Why do white people always speak of
generosity and yet take everything and give nothing?” (Lincoln 1989: 27). Whether
or not the location identified for the airfield had been previously important to the
locals, it was now significant to them that, on the site where the strip was to be
built, a royal village had once existed, where a prior Swazi king had, under the
shade of a tree, apparently once “met in debate.” As observed by Lincoln, whatever
its prior significance, the story of the tree was on this occasion useful because
[t]o prepare the ground the tree would have to be removed. On their [i.e.,
his counselors’] advice the King said that the ground could be used if the
tree were not touched. There have since been negotiations to buy land
from a European. (Lincoln 1989: 271, quoting Kuper)
In a setting where two sets of interests were vying for control over what had previ-
ously been simply a generic space, each now sought to signify it in a novel manner
and thereby make it into a different place (using these two locative terms some-
what differently from Michel de Certeau3). A tale of origins that set the space apart
became a tactical tool used by one side to prevent the other from realizing its com-
peting interests, or, as Lincoln concluded, “Here, under the pressure of events,
actors sought and found a story from the past that could serve interests in the pres-
ent” (27). Without the “pressure of events” (i.e., an unexpected competing group
seeking to make alternative use of this land, much like a competing dealer seeking
to maximize the value of a rug woven elsewhere), it seems unlikely that the tree,
because of the tale of the royal meeting, would have stood out as self-evidently sig-
nificant to the locals. Therefore, inquiring whether or not the tree actually ought
to have been classed as unique, distinctive, and significant—in a word, sacred—
entirely misses the point of its social utility.
The Iraq War’s two phases, the difference between an escalation and an aug-
mentation, the authenticity of an Oriental carpet, and the origins tale of the shady
tree all have direct bearing on the question for which this chapter was originally
written as a reply: Does secularism as political doctrine provide an adequate per-
spective for approaching the contemporary challenges of religion in politics?4
Because this chapter was originally conceived as part of an opening panel on the
theoretical, analytical, and methodological puzzles that are involved in, as that
Copenhagen conference’s title put it, going “beyond secularism,” we wish to try
now to make explicit and thereby problematize the assumptions contained not in
secularism but, instead, in the very question that was posed to the participants.
Focusing on secularism as a topic, as most if not all of the literature now does (i.e.,
examining its history, its effects, speculating on what lies beyond it, etc.), amounts
to examining a carpet closely to determine its authenticity. But as we now under-
stand, a rug’s authenticity lies not in the fibers but in the arbitrary criteria that
are used and enforced to distinguish among the many different weaves. We must
therefore look to the discourse and not its discursive products.
As much as it would be a mistake to become preoccupied with determining
whether the shady tree really was sacred, the issue, then, is not whether secular-
ism is or is not an adequate perspective for approaching the topic of religion and
politics. Instead, we propose that the modernist invention that goes by the name
of secularism is, in fact, religion’s alter ego (as has been argued earlier in this
volume) and, moreover, that it is the only means for imagining religion even to
exist, because “the religious” and “the secular” are, as Willi Braun has phrased
it, codependent categories. To put it another way, for those interested in talking
about this thing that goes by the name of religion, that is somehow distinguish-
able from that other thing that we commonly know as politics—the one premised
on private experience, faith, or sentiment, and the other on public action—there is
no “beyond” to secularism. For just as the discourse on the shady tree was possible
only in the midst of a paired set of interests—one local, the other colonial—so
too the conceptual pairing of the secular with the category of religion provides
the intellectual and social conditions in the midst of which, as phrased by Talal
Asad, “modern living is required to take place” (2003: 14). Moreover, in keeping
with the opening example of hawks and doves differing over the war’s phases yet
still agreeing on the universal nature of their shared local interests, attempts to
assess the adequacy of secularism for studying religion not only presuppose the
existence of the secular, but also effectively reproduce that location where this act
of assessment—an act constitutive of our modern living—is taking place, the site
made possible by the use of these categories: the liberal democratic nation-state.
In entertaining this thesis, we need to keep in mind Émile Durkheim’s basic,
though crucial, insight (nicely exemplified in Lincoln’s tale of the airstrip and the
shady tree) that set-apartness is a contingent attribute that results from actors
choosing to implement sets of negotiable social rules; after all, as he famously
defined it, people, places, actions, and things are sacred not because of some inner
quality expressed or manifested in the world (as historians of religion have long
assumed), but instead because they can all be “set apart and forbidden”—high-
lighting both placement and regulation, activities that beg us to inquire just who
did this setting apart, for what reason, and apart from what. Asking such ques-
tions is therefore premised on our post-Durkheimian ability to entertain that, just
as with early anthropological studies of other peoples’ use of such designators as

“clean” and “unclean,” our “religious” and “secular,” our “sacred” and “profane”
do not name substantive or stable qualities in the empirical world, one predat-
ing the other or one superior to the other (see chapter 1).5 Instead, much as with
“hawks” and “doves” or “authentic” and “fake,” they are mutually defining terms
that come into existence together—what we might just as well call a binary pair—
the use of which makes a historically specific social world possible to imagine and
move within, a world in which we can judge some actions as safe or dangerous,
some items as pure or polluted, some knowledge as private or public, and some
people as friend or foe. Only in the midst of the contest over the local Swazi and
colonial British interests did the otherwise unremarkable tree become an item
of discourse, thereby providing a basis for judging the airfield’s construction as
allowable or not.
A point that we should take away from these opening examples is that social
groups use a variety of local devices to navigate decisions about which of the
many items of the empirical world get to count as significant and thus memo-
rable. We would therefore be wise to avoid either universalizing or concretizing
these devices, as if an “authentic Oriental carpet” were an actual empirical item
that we could hold, making “authenticity” a cross-cultural criterion of universal
applicability. Instead, as already identified, for those who trade in such carpets,
“authenticity” is an insider discursive term, shorthand for a set of interests (or, as
Claude Lévi-Strauss might have put it, a bundle of relations) within which they
move—it is not a scholarly, analytic category. To make the point, consider the now
widely used, and thus taken for granted, conceptual pairing of citizen/foreign
national. Although it may be correct to assume that “[s]ocial classification is a
cultural universal, and categorical differences are coeval with human history” (Lie
2004: 13), as John Lie immediately goes on to observe, we would be doing rather
sloppy history if we assumed that the means by which we do this in the modern
nation-state were representative of all such social techniques, thereby allowing us
to elevate our local “citizen/foreign national” distinction to the status of an analytic
category. As he phrases it, despite the “impulse to classify and categorize people”
being in evidence in as early a work as Herodotus’s History, this does not mean
that this ancient conception of social identity (i.e., us/them management) was
the same as our sense of identity being “involuntary and inclusionary . . . based on
descent and commonality.” So, although we may offhandedly talk about “citizens
of ancient Rome,” as scholars we ought to be careful to clarify that, when using it
as an cross-cultural analytic tool or when speaking of a foreign form of political
classification, we are not employing “citizen” in the same commonsense fashion
that we do when making claims about our own social identity today (e.g., “I am
a German citizen”). Whether “citizen” is malleable enough to be retooled in this
fashion is, of course, an entirely separate question—after all, not all local terms of
self/other classification can be equally elevated to the status of a cross-culturally

useful analytic term.
Returning from these examples to the topic of that conference in Denmark,
if we are willing to take Mary Douglas’s advice—“anyone who would follow
Durkheim must give up the comfort of stable anchorage for his [own] cogni-
tive efforts” (1999: xvii)—then we must be prepared to entertain that our own
“religious” and “secular” are, for our purposes as scholars, derived from folk or
phenomenological categories. No doubt, they will continue to be useful in our
scholarly description of some people’s world-making activities—activities taking
place in the very groups that we in the modern world inhabit (where people use
these terms in acts of self-identification), as well as in those who, for whatever
reason, have adopted (or have possibly been forced to adopt) these social tech-
niques. However, without careful retooling, they are not analytic categories helpful
in accounting for the creation, the successful reproduction, and the export of the
worlds that their use has made possible.6 There will always be examples of various
premodern social divisions and classifications onto which contemporary scholars
will project religion-related classifications, in order to claim, for example, that the
Achaemenids had the church/state, or religious/political, distinctions long before
the turn of the Common Era. But this ancient empire predated the invention not
only of the Latin linguistic precursors to our modern notion of religion (which,
notably, themselves did not mean religion as we know it), but also the modern (i.e.,
post-17th-century) use of the word/concept “religion,” making it either academi-
cally sloppy, at best, or disingenuous, at worst, to project our local term backward
in time to conclude that whatever social divisions they may have employed can
adequately be described as “a separation of church and state.” Whether or not the
divisions of authority, labor, and resources within this ancient empire had points
of similarity to our own system of division is, of course, an entirely separate ques-
tion and one worth pursuing (see chapter 6). Such a question can be answered,
but only by devising a theoretically based comparative framework in terms of
which the divisions of social space that attract our interests in their society can be
juxtaposed against our own—a framework that must be something other than an
imperial elevation of either their or our local as if it is necessarily universal—and
this is precisely where social theory enters the discussion. After all, despite the old
saying, the otherwise different items we know as apples and oranges are indeed
comparable, but not in terms of their apple-ness or their orange-ness; instead,
they can be placed alongside each other only in terms of their both being instances
of some higher-order concept that regulates and organizes some of their similari-
ties and differences that attract the comparativist’s interests—and that concept is
the commonly used classifier “fruit.”7
Metaphysical claims about the past persistence and apparent necessity of “reli-
gion” avant la lettre notwithstanding, perhaps our thesis can be expanded further
still by asking readers to also entertain that the same can be said about those other
pairings commonly found in our field, such as belief/practice, experience/expres-
sion, essence/manifestation, and faith/institution. Sadly, too many scholars fail to
take this additional step and instead subscribe to a position long associated with
the American psychologist William James: While agreeing that our Latin-derived
term “religion” is a historical invention, they nonetheless presume that it points to
presocial and thus universal sentiments that go by such names as belief, faith, and
experience—all of which predate and cause their institutionalized expression. As
an example of this common position, consider the previously mentioned article
on African religions in Blackwell’s A Company to Philosophy of Religion. There, as
already noted, we read the following:
Not only is the word “religion” not an African word . . . —but also . . . it is
doubtful whether there is a single-word or even periphrastic translation of
the word in any African language. This does not mean, of course, that the
phenomenon itself does not exist among Africans. One might have some-
thing without being given to talking about it. (Wiredu 1997: 34)
Having been initially encouraged by this author’s recognition of the historical

nature of our categories, we were rather disappointed when his philosophical ide-
alism made its appearance—not only in his claims about some religious object
that predates language, but also in his use of the descriptor “Africa” as if it per-
tained to an essential, homogeneous trait shared by all (or at least some) who hap-
pen to call this continent their home.
We probably do not have to persuade readers that there is something at stake
when scholars too quickly homogenize the many Africas that can otherwise be
classified as different—a point that was nicely made in a public lecture at the
University of Alabama a few years ago. Despite its apparent continuity in geo-
graphic space, we were reminded by the lecturer that the many different languages,
ethnic groups, and cultures quickly confound any attempt to discuss sensibly what
a previous generation might have generalized as “the African mentality” or “the
African mind.” But having been persuaded by this caution not to overlook mat-
ters of difference, some attending the lecture were struck by how quickly that
lecturer then began describing the traits of this thing she called “the cosmos of
African traditional religions.” What happened, we wondered, to the caution about
the perils of essentialism? How did matters of empirical difference give way so
quickly to cosmic similarity? Or, as one of the more perceptive students asked
following the talk, why did she use such terms as “myth” and “ritual,” not to men-
tion “religion”—terms that were first applied to Africa by colonialist outsiders—
to describe what she understood to be Africa’s authentic precolonial patterns of
living?8
The answer that the student received from the lecturer was informed by much
the same stance adopted by the previously quoted scholar of African religions: He
was told that we had no choice but to use such Greek- and Latin-based English
terms because, were we to call such things as religion by the local names, well,
none of us attending the lecture would understand it. It seems that—much as
in the case of citing the Achaemenids as evidence of premodern “religion”—
such an answer improperly ontologizes our nomenclature. Citing George and Ira
Gershwin’s popular song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” (1936), we could say
that this amounts to the old “You say tomayto; I say tomahto” view of classification;
apparently, or so the lecturer told us, based on commonsense we know that the
garden contains a variety of distinguishable items, and we all know what to pluck
as weeds and what to eat in our salad, regardless of what we call these items and
even if we do not have names for them.
However, when it comes to scholarship, this commonsense view of classifi-
cation is problematic, because it overlooks what we learned from Oriental car-
pets and the tale of the shady tree: Names and identities are not neutral and thus
interchangeable descriptors of stable and natural items in the world. Instead, they
are devices that we use and argue about during the mundane business of mak-
ing a world that suits our various and always changing purposes. Let us consider
another example using tomatoes: the 1893 U.S. Supreme Court case of Nix v.
Hedden (149 U.S. 304), in which Mr. Edward Hedden, tax collector for the port of
New York, was sued to recover taxes paid under protest on tomatoes that several
gentlemen named Nix (presumably family members) had imported from the West
Indies in the spring of 1886. Because the U.S. Tariff Act of 1883 imposed a duty
on importing “vegetables in their natural state, or in salt or brine,” there was obvi-
ous advantage to defining tomatoes as a fruit, especially given that the act stated
that “[ f ]ruits, green, ripe, or dried . . . [are] not especially enumerated or provided
for in this act” (quoting from the facts of the case as described in the court deci-
sion). Regardless of the well-known botanical classification of tomatoes as fruit
(given that they contain the plant’s seeds and are not themselves the edible seeds,
roots, stems, or leaves of the plant), for the purposes of trade and commerce, their
identity in “the common language of the people” won the day; as Supreme Court
Justice Horace Gray explained succinctly: We do not eat them for dessert.9
What lesson do we learn from this episode in the exercise of judicial choice?
Well, there are several, some of which are likely well known to anyone with even a
passing familiarity with how we study meaning-making in light of structuralism
and poststructuralism. First, because we have no idea how to determine whether
there is some real thing out there to which the English term “tomato” naturally
applies (for doing so requires the omniscient narrator of the novel—a fantasy that
far exceeds any historically minded scholar), we can at least say that we are able
to conceptualize and then exchange an item in the natural world as a tomato only
once it is named as such. Second, naming some item as a this and not a that (i.e.,
as a vegetable and not a fruit) requires a set of criteria to be used in simultane-
ously conceptualizing the item being identified, as well as that which it is not (i.e.,
classification entails the establishment of relationships of similarity and differ-
ence). Third, practical interests (in this case, economic) drive this classification
process (i.e., without the economic advantage to be had by reclassifying tomatoes
as fruits, we doubt that the Nixes would have pressed their case through the judi-
cial system for seven years). Fourth, as evidenced by the fact that the tomato can
be both vegetable and fruit, competing classification systems exist simultaneously,
as long as competing interests also exist simultaneously. Fifth, competing acts of
classification therefore require additional sets of rules to determine which criteria
to apply and when. Neither the common use of tomatoes as a vegetable nor their
technical definition as a fruit is useful in determining when to classify them as
vegetables and when to classify them as fruits. The important point here is that
such determinations cannot be settled at the level of data but only at the level of
interests, such as the criterion of economic interest that was introduced by the
Court when it stated that its ruling was “for purposes of trade and commerce.”
(Aside: Readers will note that the judge wisely had no interest in making a meta-
physical statement about tomatoes.) From this we derive our sixth and final les-
son: Although seemingly concerned with deciding the fate of tomatoes, this court
case (as with all such cases) was actually an exercise in the state’s right to deter-
mine its own jurisdiction. That is to say, the case not only exemplified the right of
the state to unilaterally determine its citizens’ relationships to each other (through
its levying of taxes to regulate their economic relations), but it also exemplified
the state’s unrivaled authority to settle any dispute that results from these forced
relations. Deciding the fate of tomatoes (i.e., determining the economic relations
of the Nix family to the state) therefore constituted one among many sites where
the self-policing power of the state was exercised and—inasmuch as the plaintiffs
accepted its verdict—reproduced.
Apparently then, classification is a lot more complicated than commonsense
tells us. Taking this into account, our work on the religious and the secular will
have to keep in mind the historical nature and practical utility of our terms, no
longer treating them as natural kinds. Instead, we must be open to scrutinizing
the sociopolitical worlds and practical interests that the very existence of such a
term as “religion” helps to make possible and persuasive. Our scholarship will, as
well, no longer spin nostalgic yarns, as did that lecturer on African religions, about
a simpler, precolonial time comprised of undisturbed religious identities. Instead,
it will have to be open to entertaining, that, as phrased by the French scholar,
Jean-François Bayart, “the crystallization of particular identities . . . took place in
the colonial period, under the combined (but possibly conflictual) action of the for-
eign occupiers, their autochthonous collaborators, and their adversaries” (2005:
88; emphasis added). As Bayart then concludes, “Far from pre-existing the state,
primordial groups, whether religious or ethnic . . . are the more or less poisonous
fruit of the state itself.” Much as a discourse is but the sum total of a series of
practices, he argues that there are no authentic, pristine social identities that move
through time or that can be violated by alien naming conventions. Instead, there
are only a series of historically discrete strategies, always developed and deployed
in situations of difference (possibly contest), for specific reasons and with practi-
cal effects, that work to establish and normalize this or that thing that we come to
call an identity—strategies working in concert with or against those practiced in
other locales.
The question for scholars is whether we will take all of this into account when
studying not only seemingly alien social practices but local ones as well, prompt-
ing us to be more methodologically self-conscious in our labors, studying how and
for whom such strategies work, or whether we will simply adopt those that suit
us—or at least the “us” that we each wish to be perceived as—thereby adopting the
illusory but nevertheless useful identities that they make possible.
Now, we recognize that we have used the term “methodologically self-conscious”
without elaborating on it. When using this phrase, we have in mind the work
of Jonathan Z. Smith: “The student of religion,” he writes, “must be relentlessly
self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise,
his foremost object of study” (1982: xi). Why? Because, as he memorably stated in
the lines immediately preceding those that we have just quoted (notwithstanding
our earlier revision of his comments), “Religion is solely a creation of the scholar’s
study. . . . Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.”
Smith’s point is that, when used as a name for a universal, experiential trait
that, due to the varying sites of its public expression, comes in a relatively small
number of more or less stable forms (known today as “the world’s religions”),
we have little choice but to conclude that the modern concept “religion,” com-
plete with its emphasis on belief over behavior and experience over expression,
was developed in the research laboratory that we call the modern academy, whose
history parallels the movement from the so-called “Age of Discovery” and “the
Enlightenment” through the colonial era and past the rise of the nation-state. It is
during this period that reconnaissance reports from abroad prompted European
intellectuals and administrators to confront human novelty of a magnitude previ-
ously unknown. The category “religion” for those reworking their society’s epis-
temological and sociopolitical grids in light of these new Others became a handy
indicator of intangible likeness in the face of what seemed to be overwhelming
empirical difference. Much like authenticity’s link to the challenges created by
mass-produced Oriental rugs flooding the market, “[t]he question of the ‘reli-
gious’ arose in response to an explosion in data” (Smith 1998: 275). In fact, it was
this explosion of data that led to what Tomoko Masuzawa (2005: 147–178) has
characterized as the fissure in the once taken-for-granted European sense of its

direct link to the ancient Greeks and Hebrews—a gap resulting from such novel
developments as the philological studies of Sanskrit that were made possible by
colonial contact.10
As evidence of Europeans grappling with this newfound variety of human
practice, we find in this era numerous debates, somewhat akin to debating the
authenticity of rugs, but now on whether this or that newly discovered practice
was civilized or not, was religious or not (translation: was like us or not). Think no
further than Durkheim’s well-known distinction between religion and magic: “Il
n’existe pas d’Église magique” he famously wrote—“There is no Church of magic”
(1995: 42). This example is particularly useful for us, because his distinction
reinforces an earlier point concerning criteria of demarcation—in his case, the
presence of an institution—being a product of preferences and not the result of
mere generalization following disinterested observation of actual states of affairs.
Demarcating religion from magic, much like distinguishing tomato-as-vegetable
from tomato-as-fruit, is therefore not an innocent description; instead, it is another
example of classification arranging the world to suit prior preferences, for without
Durkheim’s interest in the social, much like the U.S. Supreme Court’s interest
in “the purposes of trade and commerce,” there would be no reason to use this
criterion to distinguish one set of practices from the other—at least not in the way
he does.
Throughout the period we know as modernity then, the category “religion”
became a shorthand designation for the degree to which “they” were or were not
like “us”—and being like us or not (i.e., human or not, friend or foe, contemporary
or evolutionary precursor) determined ways of interacting with our Others. If they
were like us, the question was just how much; if they were not, then a number of
designators were at hand for naming the newfound alien peoples’ beliefs, behav-
iors, and institutions: Along with the already mentioned “magic,” such classifiers
as apostasy, pagan, heathen, native, savage, uncivilized, and superstition come to
mind.11 Today, we might add cult, fundamentalist, fanatic, and extremist to this list,
not to mention terrorist (as opposed to freedom fighter) and regime (as opposed
to government).
The category “religion” then, used as a designator of an intangible likeness
presumed to be shared across cultures is one situated in a world where—thanks to
such innovations as cartography, sailing ships, trade routes, armies, and printing
presses—the prior, taken-for-granted economy of social affinity and estrangement
was being shaken in a rather dramatic manner. That people around the world
eventually adopted this category (as a result of explorers, missionaries, and sol-
diers who used this category when arriving unannounced on their shores), such
that now people worldwide routinely conceive of themselves as having an active,
inner religious life that is distinguishable from their outer political activities, does
not undermine Smith’s point. Instead, it provides compelling evidence of the

transportable utility of a distinction originally developed several centuries ago to
address challenges to a specific set of local identity claims (in that part of the world
we today think of as Europe). For if, as Douglas famously suggested, “our colonisa-
tion [sic] of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought” (1999: ix), then the
spread of this term and the bundle of conceptual and social relations that comes
with it may turn out to be the price that we pay for the ability to think ourselves
into a modern “we.”
Unfortunately, the fact that the distinction between religion and politics,
between private faith and public action, has been so useful for creating a certain
type of social order in the European and North American world over the past sev-
eral centuries seems to have been forgotten today (a convenient forgetting). In
using these distinctions in our scholarship as if they were neutral descriptors of
universal states of affairs found in the wild, we are overlooking that these concepts
are social devices driven by interests and attended by consequences; as the histo-
rian Constantin Fasolt has reminded us in his book The Limits of History, peace
in early modern Europe was “built on the distinction between public and private
affairs.” As he goes on to argue:
Conscience had fought with pope and emperor for control of the world.
Both claimed universal rights. When both realized that victory was out of
reach, they agreed to divide the spoils. And in so doing, they transformed
themselves into the shape in which we have known them ever since: a
conscience that makes no claims on politics and a politics that makes no
claims on conscience. Conscience was recognized, but only as a private
voice that had no right to public force, except indirectly, through peaceful
debate. Augsburg’s abstention from settling questions of religion by force
was thus kept intact. But it was also made legitimate by a new distinction
between politics and religion that had lain beyond the imagination of the
sixteenth century. (2004a: 137–138)
Instead of keeping in mind “that our current practice is haunted by moral com-
promises made centuries ago” (Spiegel 2005: 12) and thereby recognizing that
the faith/practice, belief/institution, and religious/political distinctions from the
17th century on were no less strategic—though their consequences were further
reaching—than the distinction between tomato-as-fruit and tomato-as-vegetable,
our historical amnesia allows us to ontologize these tactical distinctions, turning
them into commodities that can be exported to distant shores and times, as if all
groups naturally manage issues of social affinity as we do. Much like the current
generation’s inability to imagine a world without computers, the Internet, and
cell phones, scholars who see religion lurking around every cultural corner and
predating the invention of “the secular” fail to imagine the category as our his-
torical invention, helping us to satisfy our intellectual interests and to achieve our
practical goals and thereby making it a crucial building block in our social world.
But how, specifically, does this conceptual pairing accomplish all this?12 Well,
consider once again that lecturer’s thoughts on what she termed “authentic pre-
colonial African traditional religions.” To begin with, we must recognize that her
category was in unstated opposition to what we might term “inauthentic colonial
importations.” Now, if pressed, this lecturer would surely have had to agree that
she could provide no actual empirical evidence of either of these. That is to say,
both are generalizations—ideal types, if you will—that exist only in discourse,
not in the empirical world. To create these two things, she had little choice but to
select (based on what criteria, we might ask) from a variety of widely dispersed
local practices to arrive at her list of, for example, the essential traits of the cosmos
of traditional African religions. But this is a cosmos not inhabited by any actual
human beings, because no group of people engages in all those things judged by
her to be essential to this cosmos.
But having created these binary types, they can now be used to mark a discur-
sive boundary of a structure that manages the various items that constitute actual
historical existence. That is, the distinction between original and subsequent,
between precolonial and postcolonial, establishes the limits of a manufactured
grid, much like the white lines that reconstitute a generic and limitless space as
an ordered and delimited domain that we call a “tennis court.” Within these mutu-
ally agreed-upon yet arbitrary limits, a game can therefore be played, inasmuch
as a series of relationships of “more or less” can now be established and policed,
allowing us to argue over whether the ball was fair or foul. Borrowing a page from
Wittgenstein, we could easily move not only from games to language (after all,
my own meaning is nothing but the result of our playing within the arbitrary yet
agreed-upon rules that we know as grammar and vocabulary) and also to social
groups, whether small, such as the family, or large, such as the nation-state. Once
the arbitrary limits are established—either by persuasion or coercion—discourse
can then take place, identities can be conceived, comparisons can be entertained,
and judgments can be made.
This brings us back to the category of “religion”: Recalling Fasolt’s comments
on the crucial social-management role played by this designator a few hundred
years ago—when long- established distributions of power and identity, along with
the conventions that authorized them, were up for grabs all across Europe—we
suspect that the modern invention of such pairs as “belief” and “practice” or
“the sacred” and “the secular” continue to play a central role in regulating the
high-stakes game that we call modern identity. The concept “religion,” in nam-
ing what is understood to be both universal and ineffable, when paired with the
concept “politics,” identifying what is particular and tangible (as pointed out in
chapter 1), establishes an always useful structure, capable of regulating the many
social differences that jockey for any group’s attention, energy, and resources—
especially those large-scale groups that we call nation-states in which common
identities are presumed to unite their millions of citizens, all of whom also iden-
tify themselves with a variety of differing (often competing, sometimes contradic-
tory) subgroups.
This discursive pairing is always useful—that is, is easy to keep on our minds—
because the goalposts/limits of this particular game are, as already stated, ideal
types that inhabit only discourse and can thus be applied in virtually any situation.
The historical world of public particularity that goes by the name of “the secular”
is populated by far too many discrete items for it to ever be useful in any act of
signification—a cacophony of unregulated stimuli, somewhat akin to white noise.
As for the term “religion,” well, ask anyone who has tried to define it, and you will
discover that its utility is linked to its inability to be defined—much like someone
telling you, “I can’t quite put it into words . . .”—making it applicable to virtually
any situation and yet meaningless because it has no agreed-upon (i.e., intersub-
jectively available) limits. So, when juxtaposed with the infinite particularity of
what we classify as the political world, the thing that goes by the name of religion
turns out to be our version of the utterly empty—and, because of that, immensely
useful—French phrase “Je ne sais quoi.” While saying nothing, it seems to say
everything.
To sum up: Whereas “the secular” says far too much (i.e., is over-determined),
“the sacred” says far too little (i.e., is under-determined). One category is too full,
and the other, as termed by Ernesto Laclau (1996), is an empty signifier.13 On their
own, they are therefore useless concepts; but used together as a coordinated binary
pair, they set malleable limits that make almost anything possible to say. Religion
and politics, the sacred and the secular, therefore function in much the same fash-
ion as that old nursery rhyme that illustrates codependency so well:
Jack Spratt could eat no fat,

His wife could eat no lean.
And so, between the two of them
They licked the platter clean.
On their own, the under-determined husband and the over-determined wife would
each be destined for tragedy, but when working in concert, “they licked the platter
clean.” As for our pairing of the sacred and the secular, what lies between their
coordinated use? None other than the idea of the largest social formation we’ve yet
come up with: the nation-state, with its regulating conventions (e.g., the police,
the courts) that are used to negotiate the ever-changeable limits of novelty and
tradition, affinity and estrangement, doing so not only by defining certain items
as more vegetable than fruit, but also as more allowable than prohibited, more
private than public, more religious than secular—simply put, more empty, more
inconsequential, more tolerable, and therefore in less need of governance, or more
full, more consequential, more intolerable, and thus in greater need of regulation
(see especially chapter 3).14
If we wish to take all of this seriously, focusing our studies on the role of such
techniques in making specific types of meaning and identity possible, how can we
(in anticipation of the following chapter) rethink our field and the issues that catch
our attention? To take but one historical example, consider how we might go about
studying Thomas More and William Tyndale’s famous debate in the early 1530s
over the significance of the “Lord’s Day.” For those unfamiliar with this event,
More strongly disagreed with the reformist Tyndale’s complete dismissal of the
notion of sacred time as possessing an intrinsic quality. In the controversy that
originally arose over Tyndale’s 1525–1526 English translation of the New Testament,
“the Protestant Tyndale [much as with such other reformers as Calvin, Zwingli,
and Luther] went so far as to say that any day of the week could serve as the ‘Lord’s
Day’” (Sommerville 1992: 34; see also Walsh 1980: 80). Of course, these and other
such reformist views were not looked upon favorably by many who were still in
authority; after eventually being captured in Antwerp, where he was residing after
fleeing Britain, and being convicted of heresy, Tyndale was strangled and burned
at the stake near Brussels in October of 1536.
What do we as scholars make of this debate over the calendar? Although it
might strike some as a minor episode among far more influential historical events,
the question is worth posing, because the early-16th-century More/Tyndale contro-
versy rightly attracts our attention as it provides an early and discrete example of
the sort of institutional differentiation that we eventually came to know as moder-
nity.15 So the question is whether we have here an example of a formerly homoge-
neous religious worldview being split asunder by the creeping vines of secularism
(with Protestantism being the proverbial camel’s nose peeking under the tent), or
whether there is a more productive way to study this episode. If scholars adopt the
former (what we earlier called the new version of the secularization thesis), then
they will concern themselves with determining what really ought to constitute the
political versus the religious, how the latter arose from the former, and combing
through archives to figure out if the shady tree really was the locale of the Swazi
king’s debate, intent on determining whether St. Mark’s day (April 25) really ought
to be an occasion for a fast rather than a feast (a switch to the latter happened in
Britain by proclamation on July 22, 1541 [Sommerville 1992: 35]). That is, in study-
ing the More/Tyndale debate, as in much of today’s discussions of studying secu-
larism, many will undoubtedly adopt one of the two opposing viewpoints on the
sanctity of the Lord’s Day (whether pro or con) and, using it, examine the adequacy
of the other.16
Despite the prominence of this sort of scholarship, we suggest that we can

do far better. Recalling Bruce Lincoln’s wise advice in his “Theses on Method,”
to avoid allowing subjects “to define the terms in which they will be understood”
(1996: 227), we could instead see this contest over the calendar as but one local
skirmish in a far larger contest that eventually marked the rise and the decline of
what came to be distinguishable as two separate social formations in early modern
Europe. If this is how we proceed, then, recalling both Lincoln and Durkheim,
we will note that, regardless of what the participants may have (quite sincerely)
believed about the inherent value of this or that day—this or that place, this or
that person, this or that text or practice—in this episode we find social actors tacti-
cally using rhetorics of sanctity and autonomy to distinguish self from other and,
in the process, to contest social interests and attachments, thereby policing the
limits (i.e., “set apart and forbidden”) of an otherwise dynamic identity. Adopting
this alternative approach, we will no longer reproduce and thereby authorize
those rhetorics and self-understandings, and we will no longer understand
Protestantism and Catholicism as religions that were somehow separate from the
practical world in which power and privilege were being renegotiated. Rather, we
will redescribe them, both then and now, as being nothing more or less than rival
mass social movements, each vying for influence by appealing to a delimited set of
strategies—foremost being their members’ self-classification as above the political
fray (i.e., religious, pious, holy, faithful, etc.).17 Such a shift in theoretical orien-
tation will have wide ramifications: For example, we will cease referring to the
often-cited premodern split between pope and prince as if the one was holy and
the other worldly. Instead, both are now understood as inescapably worldly, albeit
naming two distinguishable systems of orders within that mundane world, driven
by different sets of social interests and attachments, but each seeking control over
the same generic domain. What’s more, a term such as “Church” will now merely
name some of the sites of governance in the early modern period—one among a
number of institutional arrangements—that all sought to extend a set of sociopo-
litical interests by means of identifiable rhetorics and specific types of regulation.
And what we commonly refer to as the 16th-century “Wars of Religion” will now
be seen to be a phenomenological category used by historic actors (and uncritically
adopted by subsequent generations of scholars who, in their passive adoption of
these understandings, turn out to function as nothing more or less than propagan-
dists) to name a conflict over competing systems of mundane order that realized
different practical attachments in premodern Europe (i.e., naming them wars over
“religion” was and continues to be a handy way of packaging and thereby manag-
ing such conflict), as if its roots and ramifications lay somewhere behind the his-
torical. Only by self-consciously making such changes, by continually anchoring
human action in the mundane, historical world of interests and contests, will we
ensure that our scholarship continually steers clear of unreflectively reproducing
participant interests and self-understandings; after all, for scholars of the social,
there is nothing religious about religion. The sacred is the profane.
As an example of what scholarship on religion—or, better put, scholarship
on the manner in which the relationship between the “sacred” and the “secular”
is used to negotiate the limits of group identity—might look like, we return to
the work of Jonathan Z. Smith. Specifically, we have in mind his analysis of two
separate U.S. Supreme Court judgments in his essay “God Save This Honourable
Court: Religion and Civic Discourse” (2004: 375–390)—decisions concerned
with determining whether practices were religious or secular (i.e., allowable or
disallowable).
The first case Smith examined, dating from 1993, was The Church of Lakumi
Babalu Aye, Inc., and Enesto Pichado v. City of Hialeah (508 U.S. 520), which
revolved around the Florida city’s attempt to outlaw the Santeria practice of ani-
mal sacrifice. The second, from 1984, was Lynch v. Donnelly (465 U.S. 668), which
focused on whether a nativity scene, erected outside a shopping center by the
city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, constituted a religious display (if so, it would
violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on the government “respecting the establish-
ment of religion”). Smith focuses not on the content of the practices to assess the
Court’s judgment but, instead, examines the logic used by the Court to navigate
the allowable, thereby making plain how strategies of familiarization (in the for-
mer case) and defamiliarization (in the latter) were employed to police the limits
of the group (i.e., the behaviors allowable within the U.S. nation-state). In the case
of the initially outlawed Santeria practices, what struck the Hialeah town council
as dangerous and unlawful instead struck the Court as sufficiently like those prac-
tices and beliefs already acknowledged in the United States to be safe and allow-
able (e.g., those known as Roman Catholic). In the case of Pawtucket’s nativity
display outside the shopping center, the fact that it was erected using public funds
as part of a shopping district and during the busiest time of the shopping year, and
that it included a variety of so-called traditional and nontraditional elements (e.g.,
a talking wishing well), prompted the Court to see it as sufficiently unlike those
practices it normally regulates as “religious” by setting them aside from the pub-
lic realm, enabling the Court to—as Smith phrases it—agree with a native infor-
mant (i.e., a professor of philosophy from the University of Rhode Island) who
described the display as merely “engender[ing] a friendly community of goodwill
in keeping with the season” (Smith 2004: 385; quoting the Court’s expert witness
who was cited in the decision).
Thus, from a point where the boundary of the group (i.e., of the normal, the
safe, and the acceptable) is under contest, the justices were able to extend free exer-
cise rights already enjoyed by some group members to a new subgroup (as long
as their practices were classed as “religious” and thereby carried out in private, of
course), while it was also able to establish further the particular beliefs, practices,
and institutions of the culture’s dominant group. To rephrase, although one Court
decision deemed them allowable, it seems unlikely that a Santeria ritual display
could be prominently erected with city funds outside a shopping mall at the height
of one of their holidays. So, in these two decisions, we see that—much as in a
carpet dealer relying on authentic/fake distinctions to exert some control over a
busy economy of value—the Court strategically used both the private/public and
religious/socioeconomic distinctions to control the obviously hectic economy of
identity.18 Classifying a marginal subgroup’s behaviors as religious and therefore
private enabled the majority to tolerate (because it could isolate and control) what
it understood to be foreign practices, while classifying a central subgroup’s no
less local, interest-driven behaviors as social and economic allowed its members
to continue to put their own identity into practice in a relatively unhindered and
widely distributed manner. The result is that a particular type of nation is made
possible, one that normalizes some interests and identities while bracketing and
thereby tolerating others. It is in precisely this manner that “[t]olerance discourse
masks the role of the state in reproducing the dominance of certain groups and
norms” (Brown 2006: 84).19
What is our point? Religion, like tomatoes being defined “for the purposes of
trade or commerce,” is, in these cases, what the justices make of it. The interesting
thing to study then is not what religion is or is not, but the “making of it” process
itself—whether that fabricating activity takes place in a courtroom or a classroom,
or is a claim made by a group about their own behaviors and institutions. What
therefore makes Smith’s work stand out is how he avoids adopting the terms in
which people understand themselves—terms that they use to negotiate the limits
of self and other, us and them. Instead, he studies their choices, the prior struc-
tures in which these choices are exercised, and the manner in which they attempt
to regulate the limits of identity and social significance. Instead of studying iden-
tity, value, or truth—topics dear to many who think of themselves as scholars of
religion—Smith shifts the ground and, in doing so, does just as Douglas recom-
mended: “studying the classifications by which people decide if an action has been
done well or badly, whether it is right or wrong” (1999: vii), which amounts to
what Bowen characterizes as an anthropology of public reasoning (2007: 3).20
So what is the moral of this tale? As scholars of social classification, we see no
reason to assume, as do many of the people that we happen to read, that the cat-
egories “religion” and “politics,” or “sacred” and “secular,” refer to actual qualities
in the real world, requiring us to align ourselves with one or the other. Instead,
they are nothing more or less than codependent, portable discursive markers
whose relationship we can date to a specific period in early modern Europe and
whose utility continues to this day—for evidence, look no further than ongoing
debates on which form of Islam is authentic and religious versus derivative and
political (see McCutcheon 2005). Developing just such a self-consciousness in
our use of the categories that we have invented and distinguishing those that are
phenomenological and descriptive from those that are analytic and redescriptive
strikes me as one of the more important pieces in the methodological puzzle today
of anyone trying to “go beyond” secularism.
In conclusion, our hope is that readers see the application of our wandering
examples to the question at hand. If the late Mary Douglas could convince so many
of us that the distinction between soil and dirt told us nothing essential about the
matter being classified, and if the late Edward Said could convince so many of us
that the distinction between Orient and Occident told us nothing essential about
the groups being classified—but, instead, that both sets of distinctions were, much
like distinguishing between the Iraq War’s various phases or deciding the authen-
ticity of a rug, evidence of prior preferences being put into practice—then we don’t
see why we cannot understand such distinctions as church/state, private/public,
and sacred/secular as nothing more or less than socio-rhetorical devices that have
stayed on our minds because they have continued to prove so useful to a variety of
groups over the past several hundred years, all of which have tried to regulate—to
divide and rule—their highly competitive economies of signification.
8
The Origins of Christianity

Within, and Without, “Religion”:
A Case Study
Theory cannot be about what is circumscribed by disciplinary

boundaries—these are arbitrary though useful historical acci-
dents; theory is defined by what it is about.
(Bloch 2005: 17)
Introduction: Ambivalence and Progress

around the beginning of the third century, the Carthaginian theologian and
sometime heretic Tertullian asked, “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” (Tertullian 2004:
v. 3, 246). The question was rhetorical, and the answer obvious: The relationship
is one of opposition and mutual exclusion. The wiles and pretenses of human
philosophy are at odds with the definitive apostolic testimony. Defective human
wisdom is at best a distraction from faith, and at worst a threat to it. Tertullian
further asserts: “We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no
inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief”
(Tertullian 2004: v. 3, 246). Yet in spite of the bold assurance of his views, there
is a measure of irony in Tertullian’s radical bifurcation of human knowledge
from divine revelation, because his own very extensive writings are enormously
indebted both to classical learning and Roman jurisprudence.1 Tertullian’s prodi-
gious intellectual sophistication, cultivated in the language, forms, and ideas of
the elite culture of his day, gave him the tools to reconceive Christian theology in
a guise that could appeal to and perhaps even convince his educated contempo-
raries. Tertullian sits uncomfortably on the horns of a dilemma. The gospel, as
God’s truth given to the world, deserves the very best explication human effort
can give it. At the same time, that gospel is not and cannot be human itself.2 Why?
The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, “Religion” 135
Because to be human in the strongest sense implies two things: First, it implies
that something is mundane, that it is an aspect of our experience or behavior as
physical, earthly beings. Second, it may also imply that it is part of our common
heritage, that it is something universal, part of our DNA, whether literally or meta-
phorically. As the specific and unique historical revelation of God, the gospel can
be neither mundane nor universal. And thus is Tertullian forced into his dilemma:
to repudiate philosophy while making the best use he can of the tools it provides.
Eighteen centuries have passed, but in some ways, little has changed. The schol-
arly study of the New Testament and Christian origins remains pinned upon the
same horns that transfixed Tertullian. Lacking his assurance, the field nonetheless
shares his ambivalence. New Testament scholarship routinely embraces academic
techniques whose sophistication, complexity, and attention to detail would have
impressed Tertullian himself. The average scholar of New Testament literature
will typically specialize in a single text or group of texts; he or she will typically
have philological reference volumes of various sorts, including concordances,
vocabularic and grammatical statistics, various types of parallels, dictionaries, and
lexicons, archaeological resources, and materials on text criticism, paleography,
and source criticism. Moreover, all of these areas will have been exhaustively inves-
tigated through the last couple centuries, to the extent that all or nearly all of the
data—which are typically copious—will have been compiled and easily available
for decades. Practically every conceivable hypothesis has been tried and explored
at length, so that the authorial, source-critical, literary, and textual hypotheses that
have proven to be dominant have already been confirmed and reconfirmed from
a variety of angles.3 Nor is the field by any means entirely caught up in the philo-
logical obsessions of the 19th century. One may easily find academic approaches
to any given ancient Christian writing that are indebted to cultural anthropology
(e.g., Malina 1981), sociology (classically, Theissen 1978), cross-cultural compari-
son (e.g., Gager 1975), feminism and gender analysis (e.g., Schüssler Fiorenza
1983), structuralism (e.g., Malbon 1986), postmodernism (e.g., Moore 1989), and,
most prominently in the last few years, postcolonialism (e.g., Moore 2006). This
enviable wealth of resources, approaches, and methodological refinement makes
of Christian origins a veritable Athens of humanistic intellectual inquiry.
Yet for all this drawing from the techniques and theoretical frames of other
human sciences, the study of Christian origins remains strangely isolated, a field
apart, pursing its own inquiries without a strong sense of how those inquiries
square with or fit into the larger projects of the university (see also Stowers 2009:
1). At least part of the reason for this isolation is that, with a few exceptions, the
field remains more or less caught up in a wholly self-referential problematic: It is
there to address and investigate intrinsically important materials, and only those
materials in their particularity. If these detailed and sophisticated inquiries are
directed to any explicit end, it is nearly always either hermeneutical4 or historical
in the narrow sense of finding out what events transpired to render the texts such
as they are.5 Such an approach is reasonably well justified in the Jerusalem of
seminaries and divinity schools (i.e., in a more or less ecclesiastical context in
which it can be assumed that there is a shared interest in this material as scrip-
ture, as revelatory, as authoritative—as, in short, data for divine intent or some
independently normative statement of principles, rather than for human activity).
But in the Athens of the secular university, it is much less clear how this refined
generation and repeated analysis of textual data fit into the broader humanistic
questions raised by fields such as history, comparative literature, anthropology, or
sociology. There remains no consensus on what broader human phenomena the
ancient Christian writings are supposed to be evidence for.6
This situation, the rather aimless, self-referential character of Christian origins,
its relentless generation and sifting of ever-more refined data, would be signifi-
cantly ameliorated if those of us who pursue this sort of research were to take seri-
ously our institutional location within the context of religious studies.7 Typically,
however, the status of secular New Testament scholarship as a subdiscipline
within religious studies is not taken seriously: New Testament scholars who work
in religion departments are often indistinguishable in their approach from those
who work in departments of classics or history, and most, in any case, are really
practicing the same exegetical discipline the approach of which is fundamentally
rooted in the texts’ special canonical authority. Religion departments often serve
simply as convenient locations within which to place scholars of Christian origins,
without the latter feeling much need to engage their supposed disciplinary home
or to reshape their work as an aspect of this broader humanistic inquiry. The senti-
ment is reciprocated: Our religionist colleagues are never quite sure what to make
of us, seeing us pursuing trivia and arcana unrelated to the broader questions and
interests that drive their disciplinary conversations.8
If, however, this institutional association with the study of religion as a human—
that is, mundane and cross-cultural—phenomenon were to be taken more seri-
ously as the problematic and framework for Christian origins scholarship, it would
surely represent an important step toward the normalization of the study of the
New Testament within the university. This is true, moreover, regardless of how
ill-theorized and vaguely defined religion or the point of its study might be in the
field as a whole or in a given department. For one thing, working in a context in
which one is repeatedly forced to confront the fact that other traditions with com-
peting truth claims exist might serve to relativize somewhat the self-presentation
of the New Testament writings. It would also create an intellectual context in which
New Testament scholars would have to consider the commensurability of their mate-
rials, and arguments, with those of their colleagues (cf. Arnal 2007).
Two distinct things are meant by this. We are referring, first, to the compel-
ling indictment of New Testament scholarship offered by Jonathan Z. Smith in
Drudgery Divine (1990), his analysis of comparisons undertaken between ancient

Christianities and the so-called “mystery religions” of late antiquity. Smith showed
that such comparisons have typically been tilted in advance: A richly described and
nuanced Christian exemplar is set alongside a two-dimensional caricature of some
other religious phenomenon, proving, of course, the uniqueness and superiority
of the Christians. One would have reason to expect that, in a context in which a
variety of religious traditions are being studied, these other traditions might be in a
position to “talk back” to New Testament scholars who make use of them for unfair
comparisons; at the very least they will be objects of attention in their own right,
and so display a degree of detail, nuance, and complexity that would go some way
to encouraging what Smith refers to as “comparative parity.” But in addition, we
refer to a kind of implicit parity. In a context in which only Christian data are con-
sidered, intelligent and open-minded scholars may become too easily convinced of
the validity of strange assumptions or conclusions.9 In contrast, any department
of religious studies worthy of the name will set the student of Christian origins
alongside researchers of other traditions. This circumstance should encourage the
recognition that the kinds of arguments and reasoning engaged in the study of
the New Testament data should, ideally, be of a nature that could also be applied
comfortably to those other traditions. In short, situating New Testament studies
in the context of the study of non-Christian religious traditions will tend to expose
the special pleading and myopic arguments that occasionally arise when we are
allowed to focus too narrowly on our own privileged body of data.
The other way in which institutional contextualization within the field of reli-
gious studies, if taken seriously, could represent a step forward is by forcing New
Testament scholars to give greater consideration to the general implications and
significance of their conclusions, again, if only to engage in the larger conversa-
tions of their religionist colleagues. This is true even and especially if we regard
“religion” to be an utterly artificial construct, “solely the creation of the scholar’s
study,” as Jonathan Z. Smith famously wrote more than 30 years ago (Smith 1982:
xi). Such artificiality actually enhances what a second-level category like “religion”
is supposed to do, by bringing together for the analytic purposes of the scholar
data that are not “naturally” of a piece, making us think that much more rigorously
about their similarities and differences. The simple institutional fact of approach-
ing one’s materials as instances of a broader set of human behaviors (“mythmak-
ing,” “ritual,” “sacrifice,” etc.) turns those materials into data for more general
questions, and so again forces scholars of Christian origins to do what would oth-
erwise never occur to them—that is, to relate somehow the detailed conclusions
drawn from refined analysis of very specific textual data to more general questions
of interest and salience to those studying other traditions (cf. Arnal 2010).
Perhaps the most spectacular and intellectually successful effort to reconstruct
the origins of Christianity in terms that will make sense to religionists is to be
found in the work of Burton Mack. He has taken very seriously the pressure to
explain the origins, development, and results of the ancient Jesus movement in
terms of ideas and processes that can and do apply equally well to other religious
movements, of the past and present, and that thus allow for a general comparabil-
ity between Christianity and other human behaviors and belief systems. Indeed,
not content with establishing a wholesale redescription and explanation, in terms
of social forces and processes, of first-century Jesus movements in his magiste-
rial 1988 book A Myth of Innocence, Mack has gone on in recent years to offer up
a comprehensive theory of religion as a whole, based in part, but by no means
exclusively, on his reconstruction of Christian origins (2008).
And there is still more evidence of the gradual coming of age of Christian
origins in the university. In recent decades, little by little, we have seen a creep-
ing comparative interest among students of the New Testament literature. This
is not the age-old use of comparison to establish genetic linkages, pedigree, or
Christian superiority, but comparisons of the sort that Jonathan Z. Smith has
long encouraged:10 comparisons of New Testament materials with analogues
outside of their cultural matrix, for more or less explanatory purposes. John
Gager, some 35 years ago, attempted a comparison of ancient Christian apoca-
lyptic expectation with the so-called “cargo cults” of Melanesia (Gager 1975; cf.
Smith 1978b). More recent are the fascinating comparisons of the earliest liter-
ary representations of Jesus with the techniques and ideals of ancient Greek
Cynic philosophy. Although Cynics did operate in the ancient Mediterranean
world contemporary with Jesus and his first followers, the Cynic comparison,
especially as it is formulated by Leif Vaage (1995), is intended to operate as an
analogy, pointing to similar dynamics between the representations of Diogenes
and Jesus, and not to their identity or direct influence on one another.11 We
also see current doctoral candidates, such as John Parrish at Brown University,
exploring the social dynamics of apocalypticism by comparing Paul to the proph-
ets of the Native American Ghost Dance (Parrish 2010). Increasingly greater
use is being made of anthropological theory.12 And there is a growing emphasis
within the field of Christian origins on the conclusions of cognitive science,
which, if successful, would explain distinctive features of the ancient Christian
literary record in terms of mental processes common to the entire human race;
such research is being pursued both by established scholars (e.g., Luomanen et
al. 2007; Shantz 2009; Whitehouse 2004) and by upcoming doctoral students.13
All of these fascinating research directions bode very well for the future of New
Testament scholarship within the larger field of the study of religion. But the
notion and construction of the study of religion may be, nonetheless, a part of
the very problem it aims to solve, an obstacle, that is, to a thoroughgoing com-
prehension of Christian origins as a truly, deeply, and comprehensively human
phenomenon.
The Limits of Religion

We thus remain, like Tertullian, deeply ambivalent. Our misgivings, however,
have nothing to do with any purported inadequacy of human methods for mak-
ing sense out of the biblical texts. Nor are the continued apologetic orientation or
unacknowledged theological commitments of too much New Testament scholar-
ship especially discouraging; this is, likely enough, a problem that will fade in
significance with time. Our doubts, rather, revolve around the limitations of the
concept of religion itself for accurately rendering the New Testament data into
terms that can be described as human in the fullest sense (i.e., as both mun-
dane and, more problematically, universal). For all of the tactical and provisional
advances to be gained from the institutional location of Christian origins within
the study of religion, it remains relatively unusual for the idea of religion to be used
with much analytic effect in New Testament scholarship. This may not be entirely
due to theoretical timidity (although that must certainly be at least one factor; see
J. Z. Smith 2004a).
So in the following comments, we focus on the limits of the concept of religion
as an intellectual framework for making sense of Christian origins and the liter-
ary data associated with it. In making these observations, the aim is not to ques-
tion the strategic or practical utility of the establishment of Christian origins as
a subfield of the study of religion. There is no alternative disciplinary location to
suggest. The hope, rather, is that by exploring some of the flaws of our conceptual
framework for making sense of ancient Christian materials, we can refine our
notions of just what human phenomena this material is evidence for.
The most obvious problem with using the concept of religion to render
ancient Christianity comprehensible as a human phenomenon is that this
higher-order category, this analytic framework, may not itself actually refer to
a truly human phenomenon at all, insofar as it lacks universality.14 In different
ways and with different emphases, as discussed in chapters 1 and 6, a variety of
religionists and anthropologists have stressed in recent years the fundamentally
modern and Western origins of both the idea of religion and the circumstances
that give it salience. The point is not, of course, that such things as myths, dei-
ties, spirits, temples, prayers, rituals, or sacrifices did not exist in the premod-
ern period or outside of the sphere of European influence and colonization.
The point is, rather, that the idea of bundling these institutions, phenomena,
and behaviors together, seeing them as somehow unified and at the same time
distinct from other types of social behaviors—in short, viewing them as a more
or less natural kind, a species—reflects a distinctively modern and distinctively
Western set of circumstances. Different theorists emphasize different aspects of
this modern invention of religion. Daniel Dubuisson (2003), Timothy Fitzgerald
(2000, 2007b, 2007c), Webb Keane (2007), Richard King (1999), and Tomoko
Masuzawa (2005) place particular stress on uses of the category as a stalking

horse for colonial agenda. According to their arguments, classifying facets of
native cultures encountered by Western administrators and colonists as “reli-
gious” serves to partition and marginalize traditional aspects of social life, ren-
dering them digestible and manipulable in terms congenial to Western culture
and agendas.15
But these scholars, alongside such others as Russell McCutcheon and Talal
Asad, have also stressed the extent to which the notion of “religion” as a distinct
aspect of culture and society developed primarily as a political category within
European modernity. Asad, influentially, argues that the modern conception of
religion as something distinctly personal, interiorized, and focused on sincerity of
belief is a direct reflex of the modern invention of the secular state:
. . . with the triumphant rise of modern science, modern production, and

the modern state, the churches would also be clear about the need to distin-
guish the religious from the secular, shifting, as they did so, the weight of
religion more and more onto the moods and motivations of the individual
believer. Discipline (intellectual and social) would, in this period, gradually
abandon religious space, letting “belief,” “conscience,” and “sensibility”
take its place. (Asad 1993: 39; see also chapter 1)
As the modern state developed in a direction that was increasingly indepen-

dent of ecclesiastical structures,16 it was necessary to carve out a social terrain
in which those structures could, on the one hand, continue to exist outside of
state power and, at the same time, be prevented from representing a threat to the
state’s monopoly on “discipline” (see Cavanaugh 2009, and chapter 3 herein).
The result was the creation of a social space focused simultaneously on tran-
scendent, ultimate concerns, but one that was also radically privatized, a realm
in which the ecclesiastical formations of Christendom could be safely segre-
gated: without a modern secular state, no religion; without religion, no truly
secular state.17
These circumstances, moreover, were intimately related to and dependent
upon the development of modern capitalism, insofar as the escalating role of pri-
vate property in the economic sphere (and indeed the very notion of an economic
sphere independent of the church or state) led to the increasing social promi-
nence of the idea of individuals, independent actors, seeking their own personal
interests. The role of the state as its liberal theorists came to see it, therefore,
was to protect individual self-expression, rather than to constitute it.18 Religion is
thus the shadow image, the denied other, of this liberal state, as the personal
self-construction of an identity imagined as distinct from national identity; and
this state of affairs is naturalized and universalized as the common condition
of the human race. What we call “religion” is not theorized as an invariable and
cross-cultural feature of human nature—never mind a feature with the kind of
deracinated, apolitical, otherworldly force we moderns accord it—until the insti-
tutionalized secular state established as semipermanent “religion’s” condition of
possibility.
“Religion,” as has been argued throughout, is an artifact of the particular mod-
ern and Western detachment of some of its own traditional social institutions from
effective institutions claimed by the state. It is only on those occasions when some
types of social self-reference and self-organization—the mythology, symbology,
and practices of who “we” are—for one reason or another come to be detached
from the mechanisms and conceptions of the state, whatever those may be, that
the strange, deracinated cultural signifier we moderns call “religion” seems to rear
its head.19 It is precisely for this reason that we do encounter phenomena that look
like our notion of “religion” long before the invention of religion as an important
modern taxon. At any time or in any place in which for one reason or another the
coercive state power is detached from other types of social self-signification, we
misrecognize the latter as a thing, “religion.” But such circumstances are, at least
before the modern period, transient, and historically and culturally specific. The
types of social practices that come to be detached from the state, moreover, vary
from one instance to the next.
All of this makes of religion a polyphyletic category,20 a way of classifying things
that may be practically useful, even one that permits certain kinds of theorizations,
but one that categorically does not “carve nature at the joints” (Plato, Phaedrus
265d–266a). As Craig Martin says in a recent article:
. . . the colloquial use of the term religion cannot be captured by monothetic

definitions because it is a polythetic use. The present colloquial use of the
term religion . . . is a grab-bag use. What properties or resemblances make
Christianity and Hinduism “religions,” but not American nationalism?
I can think of none. The fact that American nationalism is not included
in the present colloquial use of the term religion, despite its similarities
and resemblances to those traditions usually included, means that the col-
loquial use of the term religion is a grab-bag use that one must simply
memorize.21 (2009: 166)
This means that the data encompassed by the category are not like a scientific
taxonomy, and thus do not lend themselves to a global “theory of religion”; in fact,
generalizations based on this category will be misleading (see Martin 2009: 167–
168). They will also tend to reify and naturalize this historically specific social for-
mation, as Matthew Day stresses: “ . . . a science of religion demands that one sever
‘religion’ from its all-too-human history (read ‘modern, European, and colonial’)
and insist that religion—as a relatively discrete thing in the world that people ‘do’
or ‘have’—really exists” (Day 2010: 6, emphasis original). Day continues:
It strikes me that if the category of religion has any academic legitimacy left—
and I’m not convinced that it does—it will be as a heuristic device or a useful
fiction. If we keep “religion” around at all, it should be treated as something
akin to a “center of gravity” or an “equator”: an abstract tool that allows us to
navigate the world a bit more efficiently. However, a science of religion makes
as little sense as a science of equators for the simple reason that neither enter-
prise would have anything to explain. (Day 2010: 6–7, emphasis original)
The salience of all of this for Christian origins should be obvious and goes some
way in accounting for the reluctance of many New Testament scholars to make
much analytic use of the idea of religion. The period under examination is cat-
egorically not modern, nor is it especially “Western.” The writings of the New
Testament were composed some 14 centuries or so before the modern period and
well to the east of Western modernity’s center of gravity. Making matters worse,
the writings of the New Testament, as with the rest of the Bible, have been claimed
as foundational documents for the West, indeed as part of the West’s most pre-
cious cultural heritage. As a result, there is already a strong predisposition to see
in the biblical texts the roots of our distinctive cultural forms, and hence to read
those forms into the texts anachronistically.
One of the greatest problems with religion as a discrete taxon is, as has been
argued in earlier chapters, its intrinsic idealism. The category tends to be defined
in terms of distinctive sets of ideas or mental dispositions: a belief in spiritual
beings (E. B. Tylor), a tendency to mentally divide the world into sacred and pro-
fane (Durkheim, and, quite differently, Eliade), a neurotic projection of infantile
desires (Freud), a set of dogmatic convictions about the world (a standard folk
conception of religion), and so on. As a result, the very thing that marks off the ter-
ritory under investigation places the ideational content of that territory front and
center. To a very significant degree, the “history of religions” is a history of ideas,
a tracing of beliefs, dogmas, and creeds through time as though they had an inde-
pendent life of their own. No matter how much we might explicitly repudiate such
an approach when stated abstractly, no matter how much we might seek to pursue
a materialist approach to religion, our very subject matter resists us, because its
boundaries are defined not in terms of material practices, events, or structures,
but in terms of the nature and content of the beliefs associated with those prac-
tices, events, or structures.22 What sets apart a flag from a crucifix is not the way
it is used, or the practices associated with it, or the social structures in which it is
embedded, but rather the fact that a flag supposedly refers to something natural or
mundane, while a crucifix refers to some supernatural reality.
In the case of the New Testament, this tendency is manifested as the naïve
assumption that belief was the primary causal agent of the origins of the move-
ment. The events or organizational structures of which the New Testament writ-
ings provide evidence, as well as the New Testament writings themselves, continue
to be thought of as mechanisms for the transmission of ideas, of the essentially
propositional faith content of the new religion. The role of the scholar, then, is
to reconstruct in ever-more refined fashion just what those beliefs were, how the
texts communicated them, how they developed and changed over time, and what
influences they had on organizational structures, the production of writing, and
so on. The entire subfield of redaction criticism is devoted to such questions, as
are the vast majority of Pauline studies.23 This fundamentally interpretive focus is
of course a comfortable and familiar one for New Testament scholars. The addi-
tional emphasis on belief or faith in the New Testament texts themselves24 works
to confirm the legitimacy of such a focus. Indeed, the centrality of “faith” and
“belief” in the rhetoric of the New Testament writings has tended to place this
concept front and center for Christian self-conception, as reflected in creed and
confession, which in its turn has been imposed onto the core definitions of reli-
gion itself. Donald Lopez has referred to this tendency in religious studies as an
“ideology of belief” that results from “an assumption deriving from the history of
Christianity that religion is above all an interior state of assent to certain truths”
(Lopez 1998: 31). That projection has in turn been theorized as the font and core of
religion generally, the feeling of trust or deep conviction, the experience and assur-
ance of the transcendent that is subsequently instantiated in religious doctrine,
teaching, and proselytization, from William James to Mircea Eliade to Wilfred
Cantwell Smith.25 Reading this “theory” back into the New Testament again simply
completes the self-affirming feedback loop.
We can see such an orientation in Christian origins scholarship manifested in a
variety of ways.26 We have already noted the fundamentally hermeneutical origins
of the field, and the way in which a focus on religious belief perpetuates that ori-
entation. The centrality of belief also has served to reify the tradition, leading us to
think in terms of the identity, consistency, and continuity of Christianity over time
and in different circumstances. As a result, we often neglect the ways in which the
tradition is divided and conflicted, both diachronically and synchronically. Insofar
as we focus on unifying beliefs that set ancient Jesus people apart from their con-
temporaries, we neglect the ways in which class differences, gender, and other
forms of social hierarchy divided Christians; we also make the mistake of assuming
that the same texts or creeds function in the same ways in different historical peri-
ods or social contexts and begin to posit fanciful lines of continuous “tradition” that
serve as the communicative vectors for these allegedly persistent ideas.27
The notion of belief is at the center of what remains the most popular schol-
arly paradigm for explaining the origins, development, and transformation of
the earliest Christian movement: apocalyptic eschatology. The majority of New

Testament scholars appear to continue to think that widespread apocalyptic
expectation characterized Judean popular religious culture in the first century
(in spite of the clearly literary nature of the evidence). Jews, we are told, shared
a broad and at-times passionate conviction that the final judgment was at hand,
and that God would soon intervene in history to vindicate his chosen people and
either punish or rehabilitate the Gentiles. These sorts of convictions are imagined
to have animated the teaching of Jesus himself and to have laid the groundwork
for this teaching. The people who responded to this message were themselves
expectant of the end, explaining why Jesus received a following in the first place.
It was apocalyptic expectation of a messianic or similarly eschatological figure
that led to the Christian message coming to focus more and more on the apoca-
lyptic role and identity of Jesus himself instead of the content of his message.
In the famous words of Rudolph Bultmann, “the proclaimer became the pro-
claimed” (Bultmann 1951–1955: v. 1, 33). Paul was apocalyptic; the gospels were
apocalyptic; the whole doctrinal history of the origins of Christianity as a distinct
religion is the story of the transformation of the apocalyptic message of Jesus into
an apocalyptic message about Jesus, including the idea of his resurrection (e.g.,
Ehrman 2008: 283–284) and, with the passage of time, the diminution of that
eschatological enthusiasm due to the “delay of the parousia,” leading to novel
ways of conceptualizing Jesus’ uniqueness. This model is applied to a wide range
of sources, including such texts as the Gospel of Thomas, that show no clear or
explicit apocalyptic eschatology at all.28
Leaving aside the obvious problem that this pan-apocalypticism assumes that
the historical Jesus was somehow the cause of Christianity, there is the additional
problem that such scenarios provide little real explanation for anything at all. We
learn that the masses believed in the coming end, and we may even find out what
historical or social factors generated such a belief.29 But why Jesus’ teaching took
the forms that it did, why it was appealing to some people and not to others,
why it uniquely generated the outgrowths it did when other apocalyptic teachers
did not suggest the same conclusions—all of this remains unaccounted for. If
indeed apocalypticism was so widespread that Jesus and the movement he alleg-
edly spawned are inconceivable apart from this setting, then we are left wondering
how this nascent movement came to be distinctive when their leader’s teaching
and their core values appear to have been shared by their neighbors. The explana-
tion simply describes what Jesus and his followers believed, and it “explains” that
belief on the grounds that such notions were widespread. The only reason such an
explanation is deemed satisfying at all is that it conforms to our prior conviction
that religion is belief and therefore that, short of taking a position pro or con on
the claims in question, explicating the contents of the belief is about all that can
be done with it.
In fact, matters are even worse: As it is usually assumed that “Christianity”

rapidly distinguished itself and came to be separate from “Judaism,”30 it is like-
wise taken for granted that some core belief or conviction at the very birth of
the Jesus movement generated, or at least laid the groundwork for, that split.
When belief is considered essentially on its own terms, however, radical change
becomes very difficult to explain. As a result, a number of scholars of Christian
origins have fallen back on the notion of “religious experience” as a way of
accounting for the novel, distinct dimensions of the “new” Christian message.
The reasoning is that, if there were not precedents within the ideological matrix
of first-century Judaism for some of the distinctive features of Christian beliefs
(such as the belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection or the belief that Jesus mer-
its worship), then the only possible way to account for those new beliefs is via
unusual events or experiences. Larry Hurtado (2003), for example, attributes
the otherwise-unaccountable worship of Jesus within a monotheistic environ-
ment to religious experiences that suggested his divinity; more irrationally, N.
T. Wright (2001) argues that the only possible way to account for ancient belief
in the resurrection is that the event actually occurred. Although “religion” is not
the only culprit here, the association of religion with belief and the tendency of
the study of religion to abstract belief from social structures and treat it as an
autonomous entity, as the entity under examination in its own right, provides a
theoretical rationale for these kinds of arguments and renders them more plau-
sible than they would be otherwise.31
What is particularly disturbing about this way of making sense of things is how
closely it accords with the rhetoric of the New Testament documents themselves,
which construct a narrative in which event is followed by belief and belief is fol-
lowed by the construction of a new community. So also in the work of Hurtado or
Wright, event and experience are followed by belief and that belief in turn consti-
tutes the basis for new traditions, behaviors, commitments, and so on. Thus is the
self-presentation and ideological rhetoric of the documents under examination
simply read back into the texts in question, and mere restatement masquerades
as explanation. Even if one does not take the theologically tendentious step of
positing some form of “experience” as the only possible account for the novelty of
ancient Christian innovations, the simple movement from faith or belief, however
generated, to community reflects once again the self-presentation and rhetoric of
both the Letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles. The result in both cases is
that the application of the centrality of belief, implied by the most familiar ways of
thinking about “religion,” encourages a reading of the New Testament and other
ancient Christian writings that is thoroughly indebted to and expressed in terms
of Christian theological notions, including ideas derived from the texts in ques-
tion. This is not analysis, much less an explanation: It is simply an affirmation of
the truth of the scriptural texts of Christianity.
There are additional problems with placing belief at the center of our analy-
sis.32 Conceived as a mental state, belief is too often located in the individual,
directing our attention away from social forces and collective practices. As an
interior state, moreover, beliefs cannot be tested or analyzed, only affirmed or
denied. Their fictitious dimension, creative aspects, and the playful nature of
their development and deployment are all ruled out of consideration. This is
especially true of historical belief: There is no possible way to measure the sincer-
ity of individual claims about belief or to explore the contents of belief among
people who have died long ago and left behind only documentary affirmations
of belief. The result is a protection of the material from analysis or reduction to
other human processes: The texts attest to beliefs; beliefs are personal, interior,
and not subject to further investigation; and so finally, all we can do is affirm the
reality of the personal convictions of those long-dead individuals who left texts
behind. Daniel Dennett (2006: 200–246), however, has stressed in his discus-
sion of “believing in belief” that at times the fact of belief itself, of commitment
to a claim, is more important than the truth or content of the claim. In other
words, when a person asserts belief in, say, the second coming, the point is less
the affirmation of the second coming than the affirmation of one’s own ideologi-
cal alignment to a worldview in which the second coming figures. This insight is
supported by the observation that in most cases, assertion of belief is usually ago-
nistic. One does not believe, or claim to believe, that on clear days the sky is blue;
this is a fact of the world around us and not subject to the kinds of discursive or
ideological disputations that are relevant for assertions of belief. Belief occurs
only in the presence of doubt, whether that doubt is another’s or one’s own. As
Donald Lopez frames it, citing de Certeau:
. . . the view of belief as an inner state, as an assent to a proposition, can

occur only with a loss, when the believer has terminated the contract with
the believed, leaving the object of belief as a lonely component of someone
else’s religion, either of another time or of another place. . . . The statement,
“I believe in . . .,” is sensible only when there are others who “do not”; it is
an agonistic affirmation of something that cannot be submitted to ordinary
rules of verification. (Lopez 1998: 331; cf. also chapter 2 herein)
There is a strange reflexivity to belief or, rather, to the only evidence we have of
belief, namely its affirmation in text or speech. Belief is not a transparent, simple,
mental phenomenon, but a discursive action, a way of drawing borders, constitut-
ing identity, and characterizing oneself in opposition to others. The less obvious
the affirmation, the more useful it is for identity construction: After all, if one con-
stitutes oneself as someone who believes the sky is blue, they have not differenti-
ated themselves from anyone. There is no way to assess the interior state residing
behind historical claims to belief, and in fact no such interior state need exist at all.
What is important and basic is the oppositional action of asserting belief.
The textual record may itself be part of the problem here; as Mary Beard has
argued, “For the history of religion, in the strictest sense, the very idea that reli-
gious history could be a subject of study and debate, separate from practice and
tradition, largely depends on the ‘reification of the past’ that comes with written
records” (Beard 2004: 128, emphasis original). The preservation of a core body of
texts, a canon, in the Christian tradition—as well as in many other cultural tradi-
tions that we tend to identify as “religions”—presents us with a body of claims
and rhetorics separated from the original context in which the texts functioned,
and so both fosters the idea of a “tradition” based on a body of ideas moving more
or less independently through history and obscures the practices and social rela-
tions on and to which the texts originally depended and contributed. Thus, the
conception that ideas, feelings, experiences are the subject matter of our field may
be an illusion foisted on us by the self-presentation of ancient texts, which appear
to us moderns as the physical husks or vehicles of ideas, rather than as practices
and traditions in and of themselves.33 As Graydon Snyder has noted, a lopsided
emphasis on text has led us to ignore or misread the archaeological evidence from
the first few centuries of Christianity, which attests to quite different interests than
those highlighted in the New Testament.34
The emphasis on texts as vehicles for conceptions, beliefs, doctrines, and so
on—an approach fostered by our reification of religion—has also obscured the
extent to which texts and textualization are themselves aspects of material prac-
tices. A more genuinely explanatory and potentially universalizing approach to
ancient Christianity has been advocated recently by Stanley Stowers, drawing
heavily upon the theoretical models of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodore Schatzki.
According to Stowers, human behavior is socially structured by shared prac-
tices, and so internal states such as belief or intention are actually secondary
to socially and historically given sets of norms regarding practices and behav-
iors. It is attention to the latter that will make sense of social phenomena.35 He
asserts:
Such things as believing, hoping, and desiring are states of affairs insti-
tuted in bodily activity. Socio-cultural extensions of mind are built upon
animalistic, biologically determined natural expressions. . . . Because mind
is bodily activity, and human activity mostly takes the form of socially orga-
nized activities, mind is instituted in practices. . . . It is a constant mistake
of various forms of individualism to assume that individuals can perform
intelligible actions in virtue of beliefs and desires alone. . . . Activity is intel-
ligible to the actor and others in virtue of its place in socially constituted
and historically inherited, even if evolving, practices.36
Applied to texts, such a perspective focuses our attention on the effects of writing
as such. One of Stowers’s students, Heidi Wendt, is arguing in her doctoral thesis
that the New Testament gospels and the letters of Paul may be understood not
as vehicles for theology, but as assertions of the primacy of writing and textual
practices for the Jesus movements (Wendt 2010). These writings are offered in
opposition to other forms of expertise and social prestige, such as ritual, charis-
matic, or magical. The point of, say, the Gospel of Matthew therefore is not that
Jesus should be understood in terms of such details as the text associates with
him, but that Jesus is textually mediated, that the proper practices for adherence
to the Jesus movement are textual practices. And, of course, textualization of the
Christian tradition has, predictably, been the primary effect of the New Testament
writings: They have inspired and generated textual transmission, textual learning,
interpretation, and exegesis, the last itself textualized and transmitted textually.
As Mary Beard says (2004: 132), “writing . . . inspired more writing.” The specter
of meaning is simply a strategy for generating a wide range of practices related to
the writings in question.
Indeed, the failure of a text to make sense, to clearly mean anything, in no way
inhibits the text’s functional generation of new textual practices; if anything, it
enhances it. The less transparent any writing is in terms of meaning, the more
necessary it is to train students and exegetes, to produce multiple copies and vari-
ants, to generate homilies, commentaries, and various interpretive apparatuses,
all of them textual or textually oriented. The promotion of textual practices, there-
fore, encourages the production of writings that are obscure or even nonsensical.
Mary Beard, referring to ancient Roman ritual texts, says that
the implications for religious power and control that follow from the obscu-
rantism enshrined in this writing (which, in Gellner’s words, “leaves the
disciple with a secret guilt of not understanding”) could be an important
defense of priestly or other expert religious power. The public display of
written mumbo jumbo, and the importance vested in it as hallowed tradi-
tion, was almost bound to enhance the authority of those who could claim
to understand, while disadvantaging those who could not or were reliant
on the interpretative skills of others. (2004: 132)
This social effect is not unique to religion: It applies to any form of jargon, technical
vocabulary, or subcultural speech forms, and has the effect of authorizing certain
“insiders” who are proficient in the language in question, while excluding “outsid-
ers” who lack such proficiency.37 In the case of ancient Christian writings, we could
cite the Gospel of Thomas as a particularly clear example. This text demands inter-
pretation; it opens by promising eternal life to the person who discovers its mean-
ing and encourages the reader to persevere in seeking that meaning: “Whoever
finds the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death. . . . Let him who seeks
continue seeking until he finds” (Thomas sayings 1–2). Yet the text is remarkably
obscure and resists most efforts to impose a coherent meaning upon its various
sayings. The same saying is repeated in different forms, words are used in dif-
ferent ways, metaphors have multiple points of reference, value judgments are
inverted, and things are equated with their opposites (see Arnal 2005). In the past,
this obscurity has been associated with Thomas’s supposedly “gnostic” theology.
But what is really at issue is an effort to establish a set of practices that will serve
as the basis for some kind of status or identity. The text does not really serve to
communicate a stable meaning, so much as constituting a claim to meaningful-
ness that necessitates careful study. Thus it serves to constitute a school devoted
to preserving and disseminating the gospel, and to producing some meaningful
sense from it. It is practice—in this case, sets of practices related to textual produc-
tion, transmission, and interpretation—that accounts for the existence, and even
the character, of the Gospel of Thomas and, one could argue, a number of other
ancient Christian writings. Belief, and the inordinate focus thereupon, directs our
attention toward irrelevant and unanswerable questions and away from more use-
fully explanatory human practices related to prestigious texts and other forms of
“cultural capital.”
The issue of belief will have to stand as a synecdoche for the problems involved
in treating the New Testament materials as data for “religion.” Space does not per-
mit a thorough recitation of the many other ways in which the notion of “religion”
interferes with or inhibits our understanding of Christian origins as explicable,
mundane, and the product of behaviors and characteristics common to the human
race.38 To a considerable degree, at least in practice, the invocation of “religion”
actually serves to deny the comprehensibility of a given human phenomenon; it
mystifies the behavior in question, sets it aside in its own distinct sphere,39 and
directs our attention away from the real world of lived human activity. “Religion” is
what we call something we do not understand, how we categorize social or cultural
forms that do not appear to refer to ordinary or rational processes. It is our way of
saying that a practice, behavior, or belief cannot be made sense of and therefore
that we need not try. The very idea of religion segregates an artificial class whose
main unity resides only in our inability to explain it in mundane terms.
It is for this reason, in our view, that the most productive directions in recent New
Testament scholarship have been precisely those that wrest the ancient Christian
materials away from religious categories and redescribe them in more ordinary
terms. This act of estrangement has removed the protective cloak provided by the
idea of religion: Estrangement, for “religious” data, ironically becomes refamiliar-
ization. Thus has begun the long task of reformulating our basic understanding
of this material in terms that are much more broadly human than can be provided
by the specialized language of Christian theology. Excellent work, for example,
has been done describing both the Pauline letters and some of the material in the
gospels as reflecting and being based on ancient rhetorical techniques, drawing
from culturally shared models of persuasion, rather than simply decontextualized
theological principles.40 There is also increasing emphasis—though not without
resistance from the usual quarters—on comparing the kinds of social entities the
earliest Jesus people formed to contemporary cultural analogues not drawn from
the realm of religion. This process has, again, improved the discourse, leading us
away from continual debates of how much or how little Paul’s groups owed to syna-
gogue Judaism and instead offering strong explanatory models for some of the key
behaviors or practices of the groups in question. William Richards, for example,
has argued that the composition of the Pastoral Epistles is to be located among fol-
lowers of Paul who viewed themselves as schools, and who fabricated these letters
in part to anchor their group in the teaching of an authoritative founding figure
(Richards 2002). Similar analogues have been cited as the loci for the composition
of Q and the Gospel of Thomas (especially Braun 1999; Cameron 1999).
Even more spectacularly successful has been the emphasis over the past decade
or so on ancient voluntary associations as models for the formation of Christian
groups (for discussion, see Ascough 1998), particularly in the work of Richard
Ascough (2003) and Philip Harland (2003).41 This scholarship, applied with spe-
cial vigor to the Pauline materials, presents the earliest Christians as engaged in
behaviors utterly typical of their context, and wholly explicable in cross-cultural
and general terms. As dislocated individuals within a multiethnic and cosmopoli-
tan empire, the first Christians, just like their neighbors, sought out new ways of
belonging—in essence, they formed clubs as substitute social bodies. The com-
position, organization, rhetoric, and practices of the Jesus clubs were essentially
the same as those of other, not-especially-religious associations, because their
function was identical. Nothing mysterious or even distinctive is happening at
all: Paul’s Thessalonian ekklēsia is operating in the same basic ways and for the
same basic reasons as, say, a guild of purple-dyers (e.g., IG X/2.291) or a funerary
association. A closely related tangent in recent scholarship has also emphasized
ethnicity as one of the more important models for early Christian identity (e.g.,
Lieu 2004). The scenario is similar to the one sketched out for voluntary associa-
tions: The socially deracinating effects of empire, including international trade,
enslavements, population migrations, and the like, contributed to a sense among
at least some people in the Roman world of having lost their rootedness as, and
in, a people. One of the effects of early Christian theology and rhetoric in such
a context was to cast this urban miscellany as a new people, a new nation. Paul
in fact appears to do so by incorporating his Gentile converts as adoptees into a
reconceived Israel.42 The point of Paul’s rhetoric is comprehensible, not as theo-
logical inferences about another world, but as a more or less practical effort in this
world to provide a meaningful identity to people who would otherwise lack one.
And thus once again is our comprehension of the origins of Christianity fostered
by moving away from the idea of religion, rather than toward it.
Christian Origins without “Religion”

On the one hand, then, the study of Christian origins needs to grow into itself as
a contribution to the human sciences, and a greater emphasis on generalization
is the royal road to that goal. At the same time, however, the category “religion,”
though at times tactically useful for encouraging generalization, is really not
the best route to that end for a variety of reasons. There remain possibilities for
alternative approaches—not simply a new word or paraphrase that represents in
friendlier terms the same basic idea as “religion,” but a conception that cuts across
the field of data we normally describe as religion, separating some of the things it
gathers together, and gathering together some of the things it separates. What is
needed is not a typology of religion, but a typology that variously and differentially
classifies the data normally described as religion.43
The problem is that invocation of the idea of “religion” tends to separate the
phenomena under investigation from their most revealing mundane functions,
contexts, and analogues. At the same time, however, it must be acknowledged that
there is something distinctive and even unusual about at least some of the ancient
Christian materials, something that does indeed unite them with texts such as the
Hebrew Bible, the Vedas, the Quran, and a variety of other writings that we clas-
sify as “religious.” That distinction is because these materials share the common
feature of making reference to, and appearing to ground their authority in, enti-
ties that do not manifest themselves in ordinary ways in the ordinary world (i.e.,
gods, spirits, demons, and a host of other apparently nonempirical or otherwise
unusual beings). The ancient Christian writings are filled with such entities: God,
the resurrected Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the devil, demons, and so on. The presence
of these entities is one of the distinctive features of what we tend to call “religion,”
and a number of efforts to define religion have highlighted this dimension.44 Thus
we have the very straightforward definition of religion offered by E. B. Tylor as “the
belief in Spiritual Beings”45 or by Melford Spiro as “culturally constituted institu-
tions” that “have reference to superhuman beings” (Spiro 1966: 98). In the field of
Christian origins, Stanley Stowers (2008; cf. 2007) has proposed a more general
and, in many ways, less problematic version of such a view of religion, defining
it in terms of discourses and practices pertaining to non-obvious beings. The new
category has two advantages over similar constructions such as “supernatural”
and even “nonempirical.” In the case of defining one’s interest as discourses about
the “supernatural,” one’s categories are being dictated by the insider’s assess-
ment of their behaviors and experiences, rather than relying on a demonstrable
shared feature discernible by outsiders. “Non-obvious” also remains superior to
“nonempirical,” insofar as it acknowledges the supposed empirical effects of such

beings who, though they may not be immediately and ordinarily accessible, are
imagined to have discernible effects in the world and may even be apprehended
empirically in unusual situations (e.g., shared visionary experiences).
But Stowers’s characterization of religion can be refined with reference to what
Dan Sperber and Pascal Boyer have said about “counterintuitive beings” (Boyer
1994; Sperber 1982; and cf. Atran 2002 and critical discussion in Bloch 2005: 105)
or, more broadly, counterintuitive claims about the world. This is an important
distinction: Describing an entity or phenomenon as “supernatural” or “spiritual”
not only assumes too much about the problematic issue of belief,46 but also focuses
on the phenomenon’s supposed actual characteristics, which are not in evidence,
rather than on its discursive characteristics. It is only the latter, in fact, that actu-
ally constitute the entity in question. To put it bluntly, there is no point in defin-
ing the entities of religious discourse in terms of their actual qualities, because
these entities do not exist in any ordinary way and so simply cannot be examined
or described. With such entities, such claims about the world, all that we have
before us is discourse, with no obvious empirical referent. One cannot investigate
what the Christian Holy Spirit is like, only what Christians say about the Holy
Spirit. Thus, what needs to be first defined and then examined are the discursive
or cognitive characteristics that set such claims apart from more ordinary (and less
problematic) claims, such as “the sky is blue” or “Jonathan Z. Smith is a scholar of
religion.” This utterly crucial recognition is built directly into Sperber and Boyer’s
work to a degree that is missed by those who characterize such beings and beliefs
as supernatural, spiritual, or even nonempirical. The defining characteristic of
religious beliefs is neither falsity47 nor the nature of the actual objects of such
beliefs, but rather precisely their unusual and distinctive dissonance from ordinary
expectations or claims about the world: It is of their very nature and essence to be
somewhat at odds with more ordinary types of factual discourse.
According to Sperber and Boyer, a counterintuitive entity or phenomenon will
tend to be counterintuitive in minimal or limited ways: Most of the features of
the entity in question will accord with our ordinary perspectives on the world and
the broadly shared mental patterns we use to make practical sense of our envi-
ronments. A god or spirit or demon will be like an ordinary person in nearly all
respects, but have one or two distinctive counterintuitive features that mark it as
special: extraordinary strength, exceptional knowledge, invisibility, a capacity for
occupying human bodies, and so on.48 Claims of this sort are held to be counter-
intuitive by those who make them; that is to say, the counterintuitive dimension
of the claims is formal and not merely substantive: Cues exist to frame discourses
about such entities as tentative, speculative, odd, and somehow different from
commonplace claims. The point is not simply that a centaur, for example, is an
odd sort of entity, but that precisely because of this, discourse about a centaur is
undertaken with that oddity specifically in view; it is a discourse that demands for
itself a special kind of scrutiny. In the case of religious claims, there is thus a high
degree of reflexivity: We are not dealing with beliefs, but with beliefs about beliefs
or, better, with a kind of discourse that is treated differently than other kinds of
discourse. Although a given discourse of this sort will typically be undertaken
with explicit cues that mark it as distinct from ordinary claims (e.g., the contexts
in which such claims are made, the types of language used, the identity of the
individuals making the claims, etc.), the actual content of the discourse, insofar
as it departs from our biologically encoded and innate ways of viewing the world,
will also be a cue to the hearer that the claims in question are tentative or worthy
of special examination (Sperber, as described by Bloch [2005: 105]). This special,
counterintuitive character also makes the images, claims, and entities in question
especially memorable and interesting. As summarized by Maurice Bloch:
The Sperber-Boyer position further attempts to show that it is precisely the

intriguing, indicated, counter-intuitive character which makes religious-
like beliefs catchy, so that such beliefs become easily established as part of
a shared culture within a given population. Boyer says that this catchiness
explains the weird fact that “religion” exists, since counter-intuitive beliefs
are, for him, what it consists of. (Bloch 2005: 104)
Maurice Bloch goes on in a brilliant article suitably titled “Are Religious Beliefs
Counter-intuitive?” (2005: 103–121) to further refine and redirect this important
insight. The first and most significant observation is that there is a real risk
associated with identifying beliefs or claims as counterintuitive solely in terms
of content, namely the risk of assuming that one’s own assessments of oddity
will necessarily conform to those one is studying—at its worst, “counterintuitive”
could simply become a euphemism for “false” (see also chapter 5).49 In support of
this observation, Bloch describes the interactions between European missionaries
and the Malagasy in 19th-century Madagascar (2005: 108–113). In identifying the
native beliefs to which they would oppose their Christian message, the mission-
aries zeroed in on what the Malagasy referred to as sampy (i.e., cults and objects
of mainly foreign origin that had a sufficiently debatable status socially such that
it made sense for a given individual to assert or deny belief in them [2005: 109]).
As a result, the missionaries and the Malagasy could agree on the source of their
disagreement: this debatable realm of counterintuitive discourses called sampy
or, for the missionaries, “idolatry.” The crucial point is that these items, practices,
and beliefs were identified by both parties as potentially subject to debate, thus
making them analogous to the “religion” of the Europeans and therefore to be
repudiated when the Malagasy converted to Christianity (2005: 109). By contrast,
the native beliefs about the presence of the ancestors, ritual invocation thereof,
and communication with them seem to have been unaffected by conversion to

Christianity, and not subject to controversy with missionaries, in spite of the fact
that we would normally count communication with the dead as an aspect of reli-
gion and certainly as counterintuitive. According to Bloch, this is evidence that
the Malagasy themselves did not regard the ancestors, or continued contact with
them, as any more counterintuitive, tentative, or subject to debate than their rela-
tionships with other relatives or with elders (2005: 111). Regarding the ancestors,
Bloch states:
. . . people’s behavior does not seem to be marked or different, or as con-

cerned with counter-intuitive beings. To implicitly assume the ancestors’
existence does not seem to require a special type of effort, as would be
necessitated by the understanding of a counter-intuitive proposition.
Knowing ancestors, therefore, is not an act of value, or duty or daring
as Christians would claim is the case for Christian belief. Thus, to the
Malagasy even today, after total familiarization with a Semitic religion, the
idea of “converting” someone to a belief in ancestors is ridiculous, like con-
verting them to a belief in the existence of fathers. (Bloch 2005: 111)
Counterintuitiveness, then, is not an objective quality inhering in the claim itself

or in the structure of the brain, but rather a way of treating certain types of claims
within particular cultural contexts (cf. the discussion of types of “special things” in
Taves 2009: 44–46).50
An additional criticism offered by Bloch is that, actually, the counterintuitive
and nonempirical is everywhere: It is not proper to religion, but it appears in social
interactions of all sorts, several of which may wholly lack that tentative mood iden-
tified by Boyer and Sperber. The example Bloch provides is telling: He argues that
social roles qualify as nonempirical entities about which we have distinctive beliefs
and practices, most of them unmarked by any cues that indicate their dubiousness
or debatability; some of these beliefs and practices may indeed be counterintuitive,
depending on one’s perspective. Bloch cites the respect accorded by many cultures
to elders, a respect that he regards as being “objectively” counterintuitive to the
same degree as veneration of ancestors:
An elder is not treated as only the person in front of you, understood sim-
ply through the cognitive means which we all share as humans and which
enable us to understand such phenomena as human intentionality[,] but
as an elder, that is, an entity which appears to be merely an old man, or
sometimes an old woman, but is, in fact, endowed with a mysterious, non-
empirical aura which means that they deserve respect. Furthermore, mani-
festing respect is, in many places in Africa, not merely politeness, since not
to offer this respect will, though a mysterious unexplained causality, not of

the conscious volition of the elder, cause disease, in exactly the same way
as offended ancestors cause disease. Elders, therefore, must also be consid-
ered to be as much counter-intuitive as dead ancestors. . . . There is nothing
special in this since the whole of social life involves behaving toward other
human animals in terms of social roles and statuses. (Bloch 2005: 118–119,
emphasis original)
This is as true of our own culture as any other: The president of the United States,
for instance, is an entity very much like a normal human being, but with the
additional minimally counterintuitive qualities of having an exceptional amount
of power and, apparently, being to blame for everything that goes wrong in the
world.51 Or consider the imaginative construct known as “private property.” This
notion, not present in all cultures, imputes to objects the nonempirical quality
of having a more or less permanent association with an individual who need not
be present. One of the things that all of these instances have in common in our
culture is that they are not treated as counterintuitive or nonempirical.52 Although
imaginative in their inception, thereby potentially possessing traits that run coun-
ter to our ordinary or general expectations about the world, they are established
social facts and so have real effects and are perceived as real elements of the social
landscape in the society to which they pertain.53
In the other extreme, there is a class of rather less serious counterintuitive enti-
ties. Children’s imaginary friends fall into this category.54 So do such semi-serious
entities as Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, whose existence is temporarily asserted
by and for a subclass of the population. There are also wholly fictitious characters,
such as the figures in Star Trek or the Harry Potter stories. The similarity of such
beings to the minimally counterintuitive products of the religious imagination is
striking: Imaginary friends are normal children who cannot be seen; Santa Claus
is an ordinary, avuncular old man who can traverse the world in a single night and
has unlimited resources;55 Mr. Spock seems to be a normal human person with
funny ears and a penchant for logic; Harry Potter is an utterly typical boy with a
talent for magic.56 And in all of these cases, it is precisely the tension between
their ordinariness and familiarity, on the one hand, and their remarkable, isolated
characteristics, on the other, that makes them fascinating. It is difficult to identify
what intrinsic characteristics separate any of these entities from gods, demons, or
spirits, or, for that matter, from one another. Yet it is immediately and intuitively
clear that they do not appear in the same kinds of discourses: Mentioning the Holy
Spirit, Santa Claus, and Mr. Spock in the same breath will strike anyone in our
culture as a category mistake, if not downright blasphemous.
The point is that the insight of Sperber and Boyer that unusual claims may
be made with greater or lesser degrees of seriousness appears to be as much
culturally mediated as it is biologically predetermined. Various nonempirical enti-

ties, including some with apparently counterintuitive features, proliferate in every
culture, but only some are treated with self-conscious reserve; others are absorbed
into wholly quotidian discourses; others still are treated as wholly fictional. In the
comments that follow, the intention is to discuss a range of nonempirical entities,
some of which are counterintuitive in the Sperber-Boyer sense of the term, but
many of which are not; the point, however, is that their insight into the tentative
nature of certain assertions of fact or reality can be applied to these entities, strictly
counterintuitive or not.57
What is implied by the uncomfortable juxtaposition of imaginary social roles
such as “president” with objects of socially differential “faith” and “belief” and
again with clearly fictitious entities like the characters of Star Trek is that we need
a typology of imaginative entities—that, in other words, not all imaginary entities
are equal. Our suggestion, inspired both by Sperber and Boyer’s identification
of the hypothetical nature of minimally counterintuitive claims and by Bloch’s
critique and redirection of their work is that, on the one hand, human beings
are wildly prolific in their generation of imaginary beings and imaginary events:
It is an utterly uncontroversial fact of human life that we tell stories and make
things up. But, on the other hand, there is an additional but equally universal
human phenomenon: a tendency to treat those imaginary entities with different
degrees of seriousness.58 We would suggest, therefore, at least a threefold typology for
such imaginary entities. We can identify, at one extreme, imaginative constructs
the efficacy and reality of which are not normally subject to question: In our cul-
ture, this would include social roles such as “president” or “parent,” as well as
such economic entities as “private property,” “currency,” and “the Market.”59 At
the other extreme are clearly fictitious entities, which are regarded and treated
discursively as imaginative and thus as possessing no tangible influence on social
reality or the real world. In such a category belong, say, elves and leprechauns,
vampires, Bart Simpson, Superman, Harry Potter, and the characters from Star
Trek. These fictions should not be dismissed as insignificant: Fictitious beings are
hugely important for making sense of our world, even when socially understood
to be fictitious. They are ways of promoting socially valued virtues, of naturalizing
important social behaviors, of working out appropriate models of personality and
behavior, of establishing skills in relating to other human beings, and so on. A
great deal of literature is written with the specific purpose of edification, and the
promotion and study of “great” literature in school is justified on the grounds
that such literature grapples with the human condition. Play and imagination are
huge factors in the socialization of children, who are acting out and in essence
“practicing” the roles they hope to adopt—or avoid—in future. Storytelling, fic-
tional books, television shows, and films target both children and adults and serve
similar functions. Fiction is, for all its playfulness, serious business.60 It differs
from other culturally shared imaginative products, however, insofar as its serious-
ness is downplayed, its elements unfixed by any constraints other than those of
our imaginations, and thus neither subject to social discipline nor an authoritative
source for social discipline.61
Between entities treated as wholly real (and thus as active social agents in them-
selves) and entities treated as fictitious (and thus more as mental or social tools, to
be used more or less at will), there is an interstitial category of debatable, ambiva-
lent, or questionable entities: These entities are sometimes deliberately and mark-
edly counterintuitive in some respect, but their reality and activity in the social
order is asserted. Into this category fall many of the beings we normally classify
as “religious”: gods, spirits, angels, devils, and the whole host of beings to which
one might, in our culture, voluntarily grant belief or commitment.62 But this category
should also include any imaginative entity about whose salience, importance, or
social relevance there is some debate or disagreement. A wonderful example is
therefore provided by Santa Claus. For one sector of the population (i.e., very young
children), Santa Claus is a real social actor, with real social effects: He eats cookies,
drinks milk, leaves presents, and you can see and talk to him at a shopping mall.
For another sector of the population (i.e., adults), Santa is the fictitious product of
outright deception, albeit one that is looked upon with approval and affection. And
for a very small sector of the population, children on the edge of disillusionment,
Santa is a subject of scrutiny and debate: Is he real or not? In terms of the society as
a whole, there is division, dispute, and varying degrees of adherence to the reality
or efficacy of Santa Claus, just as there is, in fact, to God or the gods.
Some will object that this status of debatability does not normally apply to dei-
ties and other proper objects of religious sentiment. But it is with this point that
Sperber and Boyer are really on to something: Deity, at least in the West, and prob-
ably much more broadly than we recognize, is often subject to question or debate.
We can see this debatability in theological disputes and in religious competition.
We can also see it insofar as belief is emphasized as a virtue, as something that
needs to be affirmed, and that is affirmed with varying degrees of efficacy by dif-
ferent people, so that religious virtuosos instantiate their beliefs or commitments
to a greater degree than ordinary people.63 In some cases, indeed, the counter-
intuitive nature of the belief in question is highlighted in order to stress the vir-
tue that comes with believing, as in the famous line attributed to Tertullian: “I
believe because it is absurd.”64 Nor is the debatable or culturally differential char-
acter of such commitments unique to Christianity, with its peculiar stresses on
belief, faith, and the cognitive dimensions of religion. Islam, with its eponymous
emphasis on submission, takes essentially the same tack: It is a requirement and
a positive virtue to behave in such a way that Allah is treated as a real social actor
requiring respect and obedience, and different people reflect that virtue to differ-
ent degrees.65
None of these three types should be sharply divided from one another: They
exist on a continuum, not as classes of radically distinct objects. And their status
can change.66 Stories and imaginative entities that have lost their socially shared
sense of debatable or ambiguous seriousness can survive as popular fictions. The
ancient Greek gods and mythologies persist today as part of our culture in the
forms of literature and film, that is, important fictions that are widely known and
thought about, but whose fictitious character or lack of direct social salience is
unquestioned. On the other end of the spectrum are those fictions that gradu-
ally come to inherit an increasingly greater sense of salience, and so come to
shape collective practices in more direct ways. We can see historical examples of
this process in the “invention of tradition,” which, according to Eric Hobsbawm
and others, helped create the national mythologies of several European states in
the modern period.67 In our own time, rather more amusingly, we can watch as
potential religions emerge before our eyes in the growth of social constituencies
and communal practices evoked by fictions such as the Harry Potter series or the
Star Trek television shows and movies.68 The tendency of significant numbers of
people to act out features of these alternate realities, and to do so communally,
elevates them to a seriousness and a kind of dubious social efficacy that has more
in common with the gods and spirits (or crystals, or faith healing, etc.) than it
does with ordinary and less resonant fictions—at the same time, the majority of
the population continues to treat these entities as simply fictitious. Practice, more-
over, generates its own process of normalization; as Maurice Bloch stresses (2005:
106), a story that may initially seem odd, questionable, or counterintuitive at first
hearing can become, simply by dint of repetition, so familiar as to lose any of the
critical attention it first evoked. Even different spaces or contexts in the same soci-
ety will evoke different responses: Features of reality assumed in play or in ritual
space may not actually be claims about the nature of the world at all (Bloch 2005:
116). To some degree, the movements and changes among different people about
the social seriousness of various culturally shared stories, for different purposes
and in different contexts, is the history of religion.
These interstitial entities, the beings, narratives, or claims about the world
whose counterintuitiveness we choose to recognize and treat with a kind of playful
seriousness probably have no distinctive unique purpose (and so should no more
be reified than “religion”), but they do have a number of different uses and func-
tions that ensure their perpetuation.69 Unlike social roles and institutions that
are apprehended and engaged with as real objects having objective force in the
world, and unlike overt fictions that are speculative models for personal and social
possibilities,70 this intervening class of discourse can be deployed in the service of
several important social and cognitive ends. Perhaps foremost among these is the
metaphorical representation of sociality itself, that is, of the mysterious and intan-
gible but still effective and apparently purposive webs of practices in which social
humanity is always already caught. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1999)
have persuasively argued, our abstractions originate as metaphors, as imaginative
impositions on already-present objects, investing them with some extra signifi-
cance to allow us to think more effectively about more complex entities that are
not so readily graspable. This is especially true of society, which is itself a reifying
metaphor for a fuzzy totality71 of bundles of relationships and routine practices,
of sets of rules and the people who play by those rules, somehow collected into
an active and important entity that, however, no one has ever seen, touched, or
controlled. It is presumably for this reason that it remains impossible to talk about
society without copiously invoking metaphors, especially those of buildings and
bodies.72 Both metaphors capture the systemic and diverse characteristics of soci-
ety,73 while the image of building (along with the analogous metaphor of realm)
captures its purposive and constructed elements, as well as the ways in which it
encompasses and structures the lives of those “inside” it.
But it is the image of body that is especially useful for capturing the agentive
aspects of society, the ways in which the social body seems to act as a unity, as a
thing in the world, but again as a thing with a strongly uncanny aspect, an entity
that leaves footprints but cannot be seen.74 The argument is simply that counterin-
tuitive or uncanny bodies—not only gods and spirits, but also talking animals75—
are superb vehicles for thinking about society, precisely because society is itself as
a totality counterintuitive and uncanny in some respects. Burton Mack argues, in a
more intellectualist version of Durkheim’s equation of the sacred with society, that
religious entities—particularly gods—can function as grammars for intellectual
conversations about society, as the frameworks within which we can debate how a
society ought to function or what its significance is (Mack 2008).One might add
that the reason such entities work so well as social grammars, as presociological
sociologies, is precisely because they refer to entities socially deemed to straddle
the realm between mere fiction and the supposed “real” and objective state of
things. Society itself, the social totality, is something real, but at the same time it
is imaginative; it is something appealed to and held to be true, but the boundaries
and characteristics of which are unfixed, largely invisible, and subject to dispute
and perpetual reconsideration.76
It is thus the imaginary, unseen, nonempirical nature of deities, spirits, and
the like that makes them so ideally suited for discussions about the shared values,
purposes, and norms that help constitute a society. Social values and norms are
subject to dispute, modification, and differing interpretations; associating them
metaphorically with, and discussing them metaphorically in terms of, entities that
are claimed not to be objectively accessible in any ordinary way and that cannot be
empirically verified or measured allows for a great degree of discursive freedom in
conceptualizing who “we” as a collective might be, and what directions we might
pursue.77 It invests society with an inherently subjunctive character. Like our social
being, the gods and spirits are asserted to be real, but at the same time they are
subject to a wide range of creative modification at our will.78 Such “real” but simul-
taneously imaginary beings thus offer fine tools for thinking about those elements
of social cohesion, and the sense of totality, over which people aim to exercise
imagination, speculation, and control, as opposed to reified social roles, which
appear as natural entities and hence not as subject to revision, and as opposed to
simple fictions, which are viewed as lacking social force or import.79
A second and related use of such semi-imaginary entities is as vehicles for
highlighting, isolating, and thinking about abstract features of the social world
around us that seem to merit special attention. Again, at issue are precisely those
dimensions that are deemed to be counterintuitive, those features that mark the
entity in question as an imaginative, nonempirical being. When such features are
singled out and treated as suspicious, distinctive, dubious, or questionable, the
effect is of course to abstract attention onto that feature in its own right, to isolate
it from whatever metaphoric system of which it is a part. The point was made by
Victor Turner about the monstrous character of Ndembu masks, in his turn draw-
ing from William James:
My own view is . . . that monsters are manufactured precisely to teach neo-

phytes to distinguish clearly between the different factors of reality, as it
is conceived in their culture. Here, I think, William James’s so-called “law
of dissociation” may help us clarify the problem of monsters. It may be
stated as follows: when a and b occurred together as parts of the same total
object, without being discriminated, the occurrence of one of these, a, in
a new combination ax, favors the discrimination of a, b, and x from one
another. . . . From this standpoint, much of the grotesqueness and mon-
strosity of liminal sacra may be seen to be aimed not so much at terrorizing
or bemusing neophytes into submission or out of their wits as at making
them vividly and rapidly aware of what may be called the “factors” of their
culture. . . . Monsters startle neophytes into thinking about objects, persons,
relationships, and features of their environment that they have hitherto
taken for granted. (Turner 1967: 105, citing James 1950: v.1, 506; cf. J. Z.
Smith 2004b: 162–163)
The socially highlighted, exaggerated aspects of semi-imaginary entities will often

refer to abstractions such as agriculture, purity, power, death, and so on; it is
their counterintuitive aspect that draws our attention and thus makes us further
examine that aspect in relation to the “ordinary” world around us. To put it more
bluntly, their marked and stressed monstrousness and their semifictional nature
invite scrutiny and speculation, and so generate thought about some individual
aspect of social reality. Just as placing wings on a horse serves as a vehicle for
thinking about modes of locomotion and perhaps about flight in the abstract, so
also does creating an imaginary entity who is asserted to be ruler of heaven serve
to encourage and assist thinking about sovereignty and political power. This sort
of intellectual play can be used to promote certain ways of classifying the world,
by providing the intellectual tools for thinking about the world in certain catego-
ries (and only or predominantly those categories). It can also be used to highlight
aspects of the world that are deemed to be especially puzzling or problematic and
serve as a mechanism for trying to make sense of such things.
Third and finally, the communal assertion of the reality of certain socially pro-
duced imaginative entities works in ways similar to those that Bloch associates
with ritual, namely as a reflection and promotion of social deference (2005: 123–
137).80 Bloch argues that in the case of ritual, a purpose or intention is assumed
but typically not spelled out. The actors in the ritual do not do whatever they do for
their own intentional purposes, but relate their actions, as a kind of “quotation,”
to the intents and purposes of some shadowy past entity: tradition, the ancestors,
the way we have always done things.81 Through such quotation, one exhibits defer-
ence, accepting the truth of some authority, even if one does not know the claim
in question to be true or understand it:
. . . deference fundamentally alters the relation between understanding and

holding something to be true. It seems common sense that to hold some-
thing to be true one must also understand it. This, however, is not the case
when deference is involved. . . . If this speaker is worthy of trust, one can
assume that what has been said is true without making the effort of under-
standing. (Bloch 2005: 126–127)
This is an important social virtue: Belonging means, in part, giving over a portion of
one’s will to others, not seeking justification or understanding for everything.82 But
an aspect of this deference to which Bloch draws attention is that the origin point of
that deference, the being or mind to which one defers, whether in ritual or a range
of other social norms, is unclear. When a parent tells a child, “Do this because I said
so,” the child is at least sure to whom he or she is deferring. In the case of ritual,
however, the target of the deference is forever pushed into the past (Bloch 2005:
128–129). Imaginative—that is, socially and discursively generated—beings can
become excellent repositories for the intentionality that these otherwise-unrooted
bundles of practices seem to evince. As Bloch argues (2005: 134):
The solution to the problem of wanting to locate meaning without hav-

ing normal originators to that meaning is to merge all the shadowy trans-
parent figures into a phantasmagorical quasi-person who may be called
something like “tradition,” “the ancestors as a group,” “our way of doing
things,” “our spirit,” “our religion,” or even “God.” These are entities to
which “minds” may just about be attributed with some degree of plausibil-
ity, thus restoring intentional meaning to the goings-on of ritual.
Not only do such imaginative creations serve as excellent receptacles for collec-
tive or uncertain intentionality, but in addition they serve to inculcate deference.
Asserting the reality of selected social fictions (including of course the profound
meaningfulness of rituals that appear to mean nothing) becomes a display of obei-
sance to social norms: The very fact that such entities are not empirical makes
their treatment as such a positive social virtue. The odder, the less verifiable, the
more counterintuitive the entity in question might be, the more the treatment of
that entity as real becomes an extravagant display of submission to the social body
that has asserted its reality.
In sketching out this typology, we have attempted to account for one of the
central dimensions of that variegated bundle of behaviors we call “religion,”
namely the practices and discourses revolving around what have been variously
called spiritual, supernatural, or counterintuitive beings. Our argument has been,
however, that this phenomenon does not stand on its own, but is rather part of
the much larger and thoroughly ordinary human phenomenon of imagination
and, specifically, the differential treatment of products of imagination. What this
means, on the one hand, is that “religion” is not its own thing: One of its central
hallmarks is essentially a by-product of behaviors that have little to do with reli-
gion, the same set of behaviors that gives us money, families, and Luke Skywalker.
On the other hand, it also means that the explanation for so-called religious phe-
nomena need not be unified, that practices and discourses around gods may not
be related in any essential or unique way to, say, sexual ethics, moral discourses,
purity regulations, taboos, sacrifices and divinations, or ecclesiastical institutions.
And this in turn should have implications for how we analyze specific datasets,
both textual and otherwise. We probably should not, for example, attempt to syn-
thesize all of the details and aspects of the surviving ancient Christian literature
as equally “religious” dimensions of a single insight, notion, or orientation—we
should avoid trying to provide theological explanations for, say, institutional fea-
tures of the groups represented by these documents, or of the moral rhetoric used
in the texts. But we should pay attention to the ways in which the fictitiousness of
imaginary products is marked or unmarked, and how this may change over time.
Those entities appearing in the New Testament that we would describe as “spiri-
tual beings” may not be marked as counterintuitive or otherwise worthy of special
attention in any particular way, with the result that God, Jesus, and various spirits
(evil and otherwise) may not even represent the same kinds of entities. Instead, it
would perhaps be more useful to attempt to determine which entities and which
types of claims are marked or treated as somehow tentative or dubious in our data,
what is problematic about them, and what functions are served in the deployment
of these entities and claims as tentative or remarkable.
There may be some real potential in the observations above for making some
interesting and novel sense of the origins of Christianity, or of the development
of some of the earliest Christian writings, or perhaps just trying to think a little
differently about this material. Although it is impossible to explore all these direc-
tions thoroughly or in detail, we can at least offer a brief consideration of the
nature of some of the characters who appear in the gospels and letters of Paul with
a view to the ways in which their nonempirical character is signaled (or not), and
what features they possess that are marked for special consideration. In the case of
God, there is actually an arresting difference between his treatment in the authen-
tic Letters of Paul compared to his treatment in the earliest gospel writings (spe-
cifically Q, the Gospel of Mark, and perhaps the Gospels of Matthew and Thomas).
In the case of Paul’s letters, God’s actions in the world are marked as being under
consideration: Despite the appearance of impotence or, rather, his lack of direct
manifestation in the ordinary world, his apparent absence from human affairs,
God will act in judgment. Paul reflects explicitly on the failure of human beings
to acknowledge God, and the consequences thereof, in passages in which God’s
unique characteristics and obscure-but-active role in the world are asserted:
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and
wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what
can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to
them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his
eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have
been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they
did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile
in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming
to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal
God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles.
(Rom. 1:18–23)
Paul also emphasizes the direct activity of God in connection with his own life,
the lives of his readers, the actions of Jesus, and the history of Israel. God is a
character, a major character, in Paul’s letters, and one whose surprising qualities
are asserted and emphasized.
He is much less of a character, however, in some of the earlier gospel litera-
ture. In these texts, his role is largely taken for granted, and he operates, if at all,
in the background. He is infrequently singled out for attention, and when his
characteristics are described, they are described as emphatically ordinary, human,
as models for human behavior that can be directly observed.83 God is certainly
present, and he is certainly a divine being, but in these texts, God and his nature
and actions are not really the issue. God serves as a kind of ultimate grounding of
the basic authority and agenda of the texts’ narrative movements, but even in this
capacity, he largely acts through intermediaries; or, more accurately, the narrative
focuses on other characters or entities that enact God’s will. These include the Son
of Man, who enacts God’s judgment; the Holy Spirit, who is a nominal vector for
the transmission of divine characteristics to the main characters in the story; and
the kingdom or rule of God (basileia tou theou), in which the ideal version of the
social realm under examination is recast as a more or less spatial entity, rather
than as a personal agent (i.e., God himself). And the remarkable nature of all of
these entities is stressed in the texts.
To some degree, the fading presence of God in the early gospel literature must
simply reflect the widespread distancing of deity in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods, as described so well by Luther Martin (1987), corresponding to the impe-
rial distancing of the centers of power and governance. But there is more going
on than this, because Paul, writing in the same period, is willing to make God a
central player in his story. The primary reason Paul is so interested in drawing
attention to the God character in his story, while Q and Mark are not, revolves
around the different agendas of these writings. In the case of Paul, there is a
self-conscious and very explicit effort to constitute a new group and a new set
of practices or, as Paul himself expressed it, to redraw the borders of Israel and
“adopt” outsiders into a renewed social body. As these efforts pertain to the very
definition of Israel itself, the social totality with which Paul identifies, it is nec-
essary for him to reflect on, discuss, and submit for examination the essential
nature of this social entity. The figure of God serves this purpose. And indeed this
God demands special scrutiny from Paul’s addressees who are, after all, Gentiles,
and thus unfamiliar with the novel entity that is the God of Israel. The mental
engagement with this entity represents a first step toward deferring to the new
social entity that Paul proposes.
In Q and the Gospel of Mark, in contrast, the emphasis appears to be less on
group creation, or on the boundaries and essential nature of society, as on the
proper behavior of already-extant groups. To put this as bluntly as possible, both
Q and Mark (arguably) are addressing Jews and so reflect on an Israel whose
identity is more or less taken for granted, but whose norms may be subject to
dispute. In such a scenario, “God” can be taken for granted: He is the anchor or
starting point that unites author, audience, and even opponents. What is sub-
ject to dispute, and therefore of interest, is the less abstract, more directly vis-
ible problem of appropriate behaviors, social codes of approval, the treatment
of marginal people, questions about eating, practices regarding health, and so
on. As a result, other types of counterintuitive entities take center stage in the
gospels. These entities can include—as they do in Paul’s letters as well—angels,
demons, the Holy Spirit, unclean or evil spirits, the realm or rule of God, and
enactors of future judgment, such as the coming Son of Man.84 But of course
the central and definitive figure is that of Jesus. The counterintuitive nature
of Jesus, his especially marked, emphasized, and explicitly discussed extraor-
dinariness, is the hallmark of his presentation among ancient Jesus people,85
whether Paul or the gospel writers.86 This counterintuitive character is of essen-
tially the same nature as such imaginative entities as Mr. Spock, Santa Claus,
and Zeus. Jesus possesses a full range of ordinary human characteristics, such
as emotion, intention, purposive behavior, normal bodily form, hunger and
thirst, and even mortality. At the same time, he departs from these ordinary
and recognizable features in striking but limited ways. The most prominent of
these limited counterintuitive features are as follows: First, he claims to speak
on behalf of an invisible entity; second, he has the ability to perform miraculous
healings, exorcisms, and other miracles; and third, in most sources, he returns
from death. Unlike wholly fictitious entities, however, Jesus functions in the
gospels and in the Pauline materials as an authoritative character, assumed to
shape group self-conceptions and claimed, implicitly or explicitly, to be real. Yet
unlike taken-for-granted social fictions, the hearers of the gospels and letters are
continually cued to the remarkable nature of Jesus, and this remarkable nature
is indeed underscored as a subject for discussion, speculation, and dispute. In
the gospels especially, Jesus’ ability to speak for God is constantly questioned by
characters in the story and defended by Jesus himself, marking it as a potential
arena for discursive disputation. People in the gospel stories ask, “Why does this
man speak thus? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (Mark
2:7). Likewise the exceptional, extraordinary, and hence subjunctive nature of
the miracles is consistently signalled to the reader or hearer: “They were all
amazed and glorified God, saying, ‘We never saw anything like this’” (Mark 2:12).
The most significant counterintuitive claim about Jesus, his resurrection from
the dead, is underscored as being of a different discursive order than ordinary
events, in a whole variety of ways. Paul does so by stressing the visionary origins
of the claim (cf. 1 Cor. 15:3–8); Mark does so by failing to recount the event at all
in his main narrative, but instead having it occur “offstage,” so to speak. Even
the Gospel of Matthew signals the potentially dubious nature of the resurrec-
tion: After Jesus’ death, “the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to
which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him;
but some doubted” (Matt. 28:16–17).
The effect is to cue the hearer of such tales to their tentative, non-ordinary
nature, and thus to stimulate further examination and exploration. Such examina-
tion and exploration, textually and otherwise, became the practice that defined and
created Christian identity. We can see the footprints of these open-ended explora-
tions all over the New Testament. Jesus’ august identity is up for constant dispute
and inquiry, with multiple speculative titles being ascribed to him, and with overt
inquiries and discourses about his identity:
Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and
on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And
they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others one
of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”
(Mark 8:27–29).
In such ways is Jesus’ identity signalled to be an important object of inquiry, and

one to which different answers are possible. Similarly, Jesus’ claims to speak for
God are constantly questioned, illustrated, and defended, as is his resurrection,
the meaning of which is under constant examination in Paul’s Letters, as well as in
the Gospel of John. There is also considerable freedom of revision in the gospels:
The fact that people continued writing new versions of the stories of Jesus indi-
cates how fluid an entity Jesus was taken to be, as does Paul’s obvious creativity in
coming up with new theological claims and arguments to address issues that he
had not previously encountered. We might cynically dismiss all this imaginative
work merely as self-serving fraud, but this would be a mistake. Such speculation
and creativity, assumed to have real social ramifications for the group in question,
but still offered tentatively, are authorized by the discursive cues provided in the
texts themselves.
The ways in which the figure of Jesus is characterized as precisely one of
these interstitial entities, recognized in practice as imaginative but simultane-
ously consequential, should help us identify exactly what is under consideration
in the Jesus stories, and thus perhaps why they came to serve as the basis for
new social entities and practices. It appears that most of the remarkable features
imputed to Jesus, both in Paul and in the gospels, revolve around issues of dis-
placement, and of recognition or its failure. That is, Jesus’ counterintuitiveness
mainly focuses attention on his role as a stranger or alien, and it is therefore this
feature that the story is examining and that accounts for the story’s subsequent
influence. This concern is most evident in the central events of the Jesus story,
namely his crucifixion and resurrection. The crucifixion itself is treated by both
Paul and the Gospel of Mark as being almost as remarkable as the resurrection,
in spite of the latter’s clearly supernatural dimension. Paul famously describes
Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23).
For both authors, the crucifixion is a fundamental signal of the failure to recog-
nize who Jesus is. Paul says as much outright: “We impart a secret and hidden wis-
dom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the
rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified
the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:7–8). In Mark, the point is made with irony applied by
a generous hand, as Jesus’ true identity as “king of the Jews” is used as a mock-
ing charge against him. The submission to crucifixion on Jesus’ part—presented
as essentially voluntary in both Mark and Paul—is the noble action of an exiled
king, honorably condescending to be treated as an ordinary mortal outside of his
proper realm.
The location of that proper realm, moreover, is established by Jesus’ death
serving as an exit from this world. His resurrection, the central counterintuitive
claim made about Jesus, fundamentally serves as a relocating to a more appropri-
ate realm, a point implied in the word anastasis itself, with meanings that include
“removal,” “deportation,” and even “evacuation.”87 The homecoming aspect of
the resurrection is given special and explicit emphasis in the Gospel of John,
where Jesus is portrayed as having come from above, as temporarily visiting this
world, and the crucifixion as a symbolic (and ironic) “lifting up,” returning Jesus
to his proper home. Less obviously but similarly, Paul regards Jesus as a kind of
cosmic being whose sojourn on earth is ended by the crucifixion, with resurrec-
tion as a form of enskyment, transporting Jesus back to his celestial home. This
notion is complicated in Paul by his considerable lack of consistency and the
interweaving of competing perspectives when it suits him, such as the view that
Jesus’ resurrection was a reward for voluntarily taking on death by crucifixion
(or even his divine sonship, as in Romans 1:3–5); but even then, the crucifixion
remains a demonstration of Jesus’ failure to belong to the world, and the resur-
rection is a corresponding transplantation in response to that failure. Thus Paul
describes a Jesus who,
though he was in the form of God did not count equality with God a thing
to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being
born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled
himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore
God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above
every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven
and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus
Christ is lord, to the glory of God the father. (Phil. 2:6–11)
In the Gospel of Mark, there is less emphasis on Jesus’ cosmic origin, but much
more on the egregious failure of earthly institutions and structures to recognize
his august nature and, consequently, on his patriation to a future cosmic exal-
tation elsewhere in the sky. Whereas in the Gospel of John and in Paul, Jesus
is an alien who is returned to his cosmic home, in Mark, he is an earthly hero
whose manifest but unrecognized status is denied him at home, so paving the way
for rejection with consequent heavenly vindication. Q’s presentation, lacking an
emphasis on either crucifixion or resurrection, nonetheless shares with Mark the
conviction that Jesus’ heroic characteristics fail to achieve appropriate recognition

on earth, and so this recognition is both spatially and temporally deferred to both
a form of heavenly vindication and to a future accounting at the judgment, at the
hands of the Son of Man: “Anyone who may acknowledge me in public, the Son
of Man will also acknowledge before the angels. . . . But whoever may deny me in
public, will be denied before the angels” (Q 12:8–9).88
In all instances, whether crucifixion and resurrection are invoked or not,
the cluster of characteristics associated with the counterintuitive dimensions of
Jesus point to the issues of foreignness, recognition, misconstrued status, and,
ultimately, relocation. This is as true of the miraculous deeds undertaken by
Jesus in the gospels and their sources as it is of the crucifixion and resurrection.
The effect of these deeds is consistently to comment on Jesus’ identity, on the
reactions to him by different characters, and on the failure of people to recognize
their import. Jesus’ healings and exorcisms consistently evoke hostility, misun-
derstanding, or inappropriate behavior; they serve to establish his identity to the
reader, but they do not serve to clarify his identity among the ordinary characters
in his narrative world. The very things that indicate his identity to the reader
serve to lay the groundwork for the denial and repudiation of it: His strengths
ironically become his downfall; but then his downfall ironically becomes his
exaltation.
That stories about an earthly hero unrecognized by his own people or a celestial
stranger who baffled those to whom he was sent would become so resonant for
those who transmitted them as to serve as a basis for group identities is hardly sur-
prising in the environment in which they originated.89 The dominance of imperial
Rome and the population displacements that this transnational and trans-ethnic
political entity stimulated placed serious strains on older stories and conceptions
of identity. The immigrant urbanites of Paul’s Corinth, the war refugees of Mark’s
Gospel, the uprooted scribes of the Q document—all, for varying reasons, would
have responded well to the figure of Jesus as a vehicle for thinking about what it
means to be a stranger.90 As a character, Jesus happens to fulfill all three of the
functions that were earlier noted to pertain to such semi-serious entities: He acts
as a reified projection for the group itself, at times explicitly; and he serves as the
entity in whose intentions ritual and other practices are anchored, and to whose
authority group deference is inculcated. But most of all it is his utility—devel-
oped more or less experimentally—as a mechanism or synecdoche for discussing,
highlighting, and seeking resolutions to an identity rooted in alienation that is
responsible for the increasing seriousness of the discursive practices associated
with him. There is nothing especially unique about this, but that is precisely the
point. Speaking about Jesus as a particular type of social strategy was attractive for
exactly the same reasons that, at the same time and among similar people, escap-
ist novels, Stoic philosophy, and voluntary associations also flourished.
Conclusions
In the end then, the New Testament attests to a practice of representing the charac-
ter of Jesus that is indeed a thoroughly human phenomenon, actually a quite ordi-
nary phenomenon. But that particular phenomenon is perhaps not best related to
the broader and synthetic cluster of practices that we tend to call “religion,” but
simply described as the cross-cultural propensity to create and transmit interest-
ing narratives. As Willi Braun says about the Gospel of Mark, “it’s just another
story.” And as with any story, from Hamlet to Harry Potter, there is widespread
appeal to imaginary entities that are remarkable in one way or another. In the
New Testament, these imaginary entities include not only such obviously nonem-
pirical beings as God, angels, the Holy Spirit, and the Son of Man, but also such
social constructs as fathers, families, governors, teachers, students, prophets, and
wise men, and fictionalizations of what are essentially ordinary and probably real
human persons (e.g., Simon Peter). What merits our attention is the tendency to
treat imaginative creations with greater or lesser degrees of seriousness, a kind
of socially shared meta-narrative about such beings. All of these imaginative cre-
ations have some kind of social utility: They are after all products of language,
which is itself a socially shared modelling structure. But certain of these entities
come to have a special utility, precisely because they possess remarkable and coun-
terintuitive features that focus attention and define those features as of special
interest, as problematic, or as aspects of life that the storytellers themselves found
to be odd and counterintuitive. The gradual assertion of the reality of some of
these entities reflects a confirmation of their seriousness, their broader applicabil-
ity, and their effective social force. The character of Jesus could have remained
an assortment of legends about a fictionalized hero, akin to stories about Robin
Hood or King Arthur.91 The fact that he did not is the consequence of a small but
growing body of people who deemed this character, and especially his status as
a kind of ancestral exile, to be sufficiently important and salient to their social
constitution and shared habits that the practices of discussing the story became
increasingly more shared assertions of its reality. This process is really what we
mean by the “origins” of Christianity.
The value of such a conclusion will be found less in what new interpretive
insights it generates than in its overall potential for demystifying facets of ancient
Christianity that the more composite and sequestered category of religion leaves
intact. What is important is not so much what is present as what is absent. Among
other things, belief is absent: We are speaking not about internal states of convic-
tion, but rather about socially agreed-upon practices of discussing certain entities
in certain ways. Individual genius and individual intentions vanish with belief:
The texts—as well as whatever nontextual data might be available to us—are rem-
nants or consequences of patterns of discursive practice, not testimonies to or
vehicles for ideas. A single point of origin or any linear development of ideas is
also absent in this reconstruction: There is no single moment, single cause, single
concept, or single unique feature that accounts for the explosion of speculative
taletelling about Jesus. Also set aside is any unique point of origin for the aug-
mented concern with the figure of Jesus: What is important for Christian begin-
nings is no more than a practice of treating certain stories in a particular way,
not their content, not their origin, and not their ostensible point of reference. The
historical Jesus can be put to bed once and for all. All of these absences and omis-
sions follow from trying to look at one aspect of Christian beginnings in ways that
set aside the notion of religion itself. The feature most diagnostic of the “special”
character of ancient Christianity (i.e., its “special” treatment of Jesus) need not
be very special after all. Neither, then, should our scholarly treatment of Jesus in
particular or ancient Christianity in general make any special claims for itself. The
compulsion to do so is greatly reduced by abstaining from the passel of mystifying
suppositions that are so tenaciously yoked to the idea of religion. Similar demys-
tification could, presumably, be undertaken by students of Islam, Hinduism, or
Buddhism who are willing to let go of the idea that each of these “traditions”
intrinsically constitutes a “tradition” at all, never mind one of some special char-
acter somehow inherently related to other things called traditions. But, if we are
serious about dispensing with “religion,” this will also mean that the application
of the kind of approach undertaken above to Christian origins will apply, or could
apply, equally well to any imaginative or discursive practices, and not simply those
that correspond to what is normally covered in religious studies departments. If,
indeed, our approach is at all cogent, it should also apply to, say, “the Market” (with
its counterintuitive invisible hand), ethnic identity, nations, political offices, pop
culture, reality television, spectator sports, and many other cultural phenomena.
It would be a shame, then, to deconstruct “religion,” only to limit the application
of that deconstruction to, alas, “religion.”
Afterword
shortly before we sent the completed manuscript for this book off to the press,
we noticed an announcement for an upcoming conference at a university in the
southern United States that was to take place later in the fall of 2011. The descrip-
tion for the event read as follows:
Few social and cultural forces have affected human society as deeply as
organized religion. Taking a historical perspective, this conference exam-
ines in a workshop format how Christian culture and community was
constructed and reconstructed in various circumstances, in ways that defy
most modern generalizations. Focusing on the wide range of approaches
taken by contemporary scholars in the study of ancient and medieval
Christianity, the goal is to launch a wider discussion about methods and
concepts in the study of religion in various historical settings.
If readers have stayed with us this far, then we hope that they are now able to
read such an announcement with a sharpened set of critical tools—seeing schol-
arship as itself constitutive of our social worlds and not simply floating above it
like an omniscient narrator in a novel. That the opening sentence’s “organized
religion” is meaningful only inasmuch as it is implicitly opposed to some unspo-
ken notion of spirituality or experience may have already been obvious to read-
ers. If so, then the ability to find in this conference description a sympathetic
nod to William James’s troublesome views on private religious experience as the
presocial, causal force behind public, institutionalized religion might mean that
readers can also detect in this description Paul Tillich’s once-popular views on
religion as a unique and separate force operating outside of, and thereby inter-
acting with, culture—inasmuch as religion is assumed to be a force that does
not just affect all the rest of society (as opposed to being just one more mundane
172 Afterword
social practice among others), but, predictably, affects it “deeply.” Wherever read-
ers find the rhetoric of depth or authenticity, we are hoping that they will become
a little more curious about what is going on beneath the surface, as it were.
But even if this is all too apparent, it is especially the partial historicization that
we hope readers are now able to see—an approach that is strategically useful in a
way that ought to attract the attention of any who claim to take history seriously.
In the midst of seeming to be progressive by focusing on discrete situations and
contexts—the so-called historical perspective that examines how Christianity is
“constructed and reconstructed in various circumstances”—readers might now
be curious about how it is that those organizing this event know what in the
world of human doings counts as data worth examining, worth putting beside
one another (i.e., what gets to count as Christian, especially across the ages). That
is, the very criteria that scholars bring to their data and the narrative devices that
they employ to link the discrete items that their criteria enable them to select from
the almost limitless archive of human doings are among the very things that we
ought to be studying if we are interested in examining how it is that such a thing
as “Christianity” came into existence and endures over time. Just what is it that
historically and geographically separated data, from the ancient to the medieval
world, have in common? Our position is that, if there is in fact anything in com-
mon, then that commonality exists at the level of discourse and not at the level of
the objects’ essential and thus shared identity.
We therefore hope that readers can look more closely at the wording “various
circumstances” in this conference description, asking themselves how the gener-
alization that goes by the name of “Christian” is working and just why it is that
a social designator (i.e., “I am a Christian, are you?”), used so differently by so
many people, is so easily adopted by scholars and then universalized and natural-
ized, as if it names something real in the world that obviously endures in “various
circumstances.” If it does endure, then we think that is because we keep working
to find it. And this is true of using the designator “Christian” no less than using
“religion,” something that apparently also exists “in various historical settings.”
Accordingly, “the history of Christianity,” just as much as “the history of religion,”
can now be understood to be an oxymoron.
Our hope is that the apparent neutrality and supposed innocence of our schol-
arly tools have been undermined just a little by the previous chapters. We also
hope that readers find it a little more difficult to see things in the world as obvi-
ously interesting, self-evidently meaningful, and inherently linked to other things
in the world; we still want to find interest in things, of course, but, as the epigraph
to this book indicated, we’re encouraging scholars to entertain being responsible
for the ways in which they actively make (as opposed to passively find) things in the
mundane world of human doings significant. These chapters have therefore been
an invitation or perhaps a challenge for scholars to, as that conference description
Afterword 173
put it, launch a wider discussion that actually takes a historical perspective—one
that takes scholarly practices and conventions as seriously as scholars take those
of other people. For, as Jonathan Z. Smith once remarked in the opening to his
Imagining Religion, and as we have already quoted, we “must be relentlessly self-
conscious.” In fact, as Smith went on to conclude, this self-consciousness “consti-
tutes [our] primary expertise, [our] foremost object of study” (1982: xi).
Notes
p r e face
1. Benedict cited the letter of Paul to the Ephesians (6:10–12) to support his point:
“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of
God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is
not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against
the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
realms.” See “Pope Tells Clergy in Angola to Work Against Belief in Witchcraft”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/world/africa/22pope.html?ref=world
(accessed March 28, 2009). For the text of the address, see the Vatican’s site: http://
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2009/documents/hf_ben-
xvi_hom_20090321_sao-paolo_en.html (accessed March 28, 2009).
in t roduc t ion
1. The complete transcript of the debate can be found at http://www.clipsandcom-
ment.com/2008/09/26/full-transcript-first-presidential-debatebarack-obama-
john-mccainoxford-ms-september-26-2008/ (accessed September 28, 2008).
2. See http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=4418698 (accessed
September 28, 2008). See http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/86xx/doc8690/10-24-
CostOfWar_Testimony.pdf for the U.S. Congressional Budget Office document
from March 24, 2007, which estimates that $604 billion had been spent on the
two wars from September 2001 until the end of 2007.
3. According to the Whitehouse’s Office of Management and Budget, the 2008 bud-
get’s income was at the time projected to total $2.662 trillion (the expenditures
were projected to total $2.9 trillion, adding $239 billion to the federal deficit), mak-
ing the proposed “bailout” approximately 38 percent of 2008’s projected receipts;
see Table 1.1. Summary of Receipts, Outlays, and Surpluses or Deficits: 1789–2012,
176 Notes
posted at http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2008/
pdf/hist.pdf (accessed May 8, 2012).
4. Russell McCutcheon served as the respondent to Robert Campany’s paper on
Chinese religions as part of “Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia
and Europe,” held at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, October 15–17, 2008.
For the published version of this paper, see McCutcheon 2012.
c h a p t er 1
1. This is precisely the point made by Jonathan Z. Smith (1998: 281) when he com-
plains that
[i]t was once a tactic of students of religion to cite the appendix of James
H. Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion (1912), which lists more than fifty
definitions of religion, to demonstrate that “the effort clearly to define reli-
gion in short compass is a hopeless task” (King 1954). Not at all! The moral
of Leuba is not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined,
with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways. . . . “Religion” is not a
native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes
and therefore is theirs to define.
Smith is undoubtedly correct that merely citing the multiplicity of definitions of
religion, or again their absence of native standing, is insufficient to dispose of
the term. But, as will be argued at greater length in the remainder of this volume
(see especially chapters 6 and 7), religion actually is a native term—native, that is,
to the modern West, and deeply implicated with the culture and politics thereof.
Any definition of religion that creates a disciplinary horizon, as does, for example,
“culture” in anthropology (see Smith 1998: 281–282), thus implies that it is rea-
sonable, even necessary, to approach this dataset in some way that is distinct from
one’s approaches to other human behaviors.
2. The basis for such a perception, and its relationship to developed theism, is nicely
summarized in Müller 1889: 126:
I hold that the only justification for a belief in a Beyond of any kind what-
ever lies in the original perception of something infinite which is involved
in a large class of our ordinary sensuous and finite perceptions. But I hold
equally strongly that this perception of a Beyond remained undeveloped for
a long time, that it assumed its first form in the numberless names of what
we call deities, till at last it threw off its husk and disclosed the ripe grain,
namely the name and concept of a Beyond, of an Infinite, or, in the highest
sense, of a Supreme Being.
3. This general characterization applies as well to the more explicit effort to define
religion offered by Melford Spiro (1966) precisely as “an institution consisting of
culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings”
(96) whose differentia consists solely in that superhuman reference (98). Smith
Notes 177
(1998: 281) apparently to the contrary, the substitution of “superhuman” for the
more usual “supernatural” only replaces one conundrum (the metaphysical dis-
tinction of natural versus supernatural) with another (the slippery slope of defin-
ing religion in terms of power relations).
4. By “Modern,” we do not mean simply recent times, but rather something quite
specific (hence the capital M): the historical transition in Western Europe (and
to a more limited extent and with considerable complications, in those places in
the world in contact with Western European powers) from medieval and feudal
institutions in which work was carried out and identity managed to those that
have characterized the postmedieval and increasingly capitalist West up to the 21st
century. Thus, private property, for instance, or the idea of the essential equality of
persons, or the definition and understanding of the “person” as an isolated, willful,
and self-interested subject are all “modern,” even if the roots of such concepts—
and other ideas and social constellations typical of the Enlightenment—can in fact
be traced to the Renaissance and Reformation periods, if not to several centuries
earlier. See chapter 3 for additional discussion.
5. Although such a functionalist reading of Marx is not too far removed from his
own comments about religion, Marx himself would never have offered these char-
acteristics as a sufficient definition of religion: For him, religion seems to be a
self-evidently particular type within the broader functional framework of general-
ized “ideology.” In fact, philosophical idealism is functionally identical to religion
according to Marx’s theories. Hence, an acceptance of his theory of religion might
generate a functional definition of religion, but Marx himself does not employ
one.
6. Geertz attempts to avoid this problem by carefully distinguishing between sci-
entific and religious “perspectives” (Geertz 1966: 26–28). But there is nothing
intrinsic to scientific investigation that ensures its utilitarian character or its
methodological scepticism, as Geertz would have it. Pure research, even when
it fails, implicitly imputes intelligibility to aspects of the cosmos that we do not
understand, and science has not always or consistently defined itself in terms of
an institutionalized scepticism. Note also how similar this religion-versus-science
typology is to the intellectualist definitions of Tylor and Frazer.
7. On this important and complicated point, see, among others, McCutcheon (1998:
52); Smith (1982: xi; 1990: 51); Wiebe 1992; and chapter 6. Regarding Smith’s
oft-cited and complicated stance on the definition of religion (especially 1982: xi),
see note 1 above and especially chapter 6. In the immediate context, the perceptive
remarks of Stowers capture Smith’s point most clearly: “Smith, I think, means
that the concept of religion employed by scholars in the academy ought to be a
fully critical second-order category justified only by its utility for some program
of enquiry; it ought not to be a folk concept or one justified by norms internal to
some religious group or perspective” (Stowers 2008: 435; emphasis original). This
is also a view articulated by Frazer (1933: 50): “There is probably no subject in the
178 Notes
world about which opinions differ so much as the nature of religion, and to
frame a definition of it which would satisfy every one must obviously be impos-
sible. All a writer can do is, first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and
afterwards to employ the word consistently in that sense throughout his work.”
8. Or, at least, that particular set of cultural institutions called “religion.” In fact, how-
ever, apart from the recent phenomenon of public primary and secondary education,
Western democracies seem to have at least some aversion to the state’s direct control
over culture. This aversion can be seen, for instance, in the pejoratively intended
description of the media in nondemocratic countries as “state-controlled.”
9. To the point that Stowers (2008: 434) declares that at present, “despair about
‘religion as an object of study’ has become nearly hysterical.” He cites Asad 1993;
Dubuisson 2003; and Fitzgerald 2000.
10. So Maurice Bloch 2008: 2055: Those who propose global theories of religion
“ . . . forget the fact that anthropologists have, after countless fruitless attempts,
found it impossible to usefully and convincingly cross-culturally isolate or define
a distinct phenomenon that can analytically be labelled ‘religion.’”
c h a p t er 2
1. Although for obvious reasons this chapter will not be reviewing the Guide in any
detail (one of the authors was an editor and the other a contributor), we occasion-
ally make reference to it. Also, for the purpose of this chapter, we treat all of these
resources as instances of the handbook genre, despite the fact that one could jus-
tifiably distinguish between the more idiosyncratic content of a word book (e.g.,
Taylor’s or Lopez’s volume) and the (at least ideally) more systematic, fieldwide
nature of a companion. Because the companion books under review combine fea-
tures of both genres (i.e., combining approaches and topics), we feel comfortable
discussing all of these resources together, as examples of the same genre.
2. See McCutcheon 1997b: 139–144 for a survey of the reception of the Encyclopedia
of Religion’s first edition.
3. While counting it within this genre, it is important to note that Routledge’s A
Companion to Philosophy of Religion is, much like the many Companions published
by Blackwell in its series (i.e., each on such topics as Protestantism, Hinduism,
Judaism, Modern Theology, Political Theology, Christian Ethics, etc.), devoted
mainly to what might be considered a subfield, whereas the others are all aimed
at the general study of religion itself. Robert Orsi’s addition to this literature
(2011) came to our attention too late to incorporate it into this chapter’s analysis.
4. Sharpe, also the author of a still-important history of our field (1986), completed
his essay—“The Study of Religion in Historical Perspective”—for Hinnells’s
Companion just days before his death.
5. It is unclear whether, in his volume, theology is an approach or a discipline (both
of which are placed in his opening section); it is likely that Segal considers it to be
Notes 179
a discipline because the essay on the comparative method is the only item in this
section of the book that seems to qualify as an approach (though, of course, for
some, comparative religion may justifiably be, or have once been, a discipline).
6. With the placement of articles in mind, one wonders why Garrett Green’s
article “Hermeneutics”—defined initially and simply as “the theory of
interpretation”—appears in the “Key Issues” section of Hinnells’s volume,
whereas “Phenomenology of Religion” is a “Key Approach.” Although some
scholars could easily be persuaded that both constitute issues—going so far, per-
haps, as to see them as problematics or even as outright problems—and not
methods to be used in the academic study of religion, it is odd to separate them
in this manner.
7. An excerpt of Taylor’s introduction can be found at http://www.press.uchicago.
edu/Misc/Chicago/791572.html (accessed August 29, 2011).
8. Much in the way a sports fan can become disoriented when a league expands, we
admit to never being quite sure how many world religions there now are, as the
current spate of textbooks puts the number rather higher than seven; for exam-
ple, one of the (if not the) best-selling “world religions” textbooks in our field,
Living Religions (Fisher 2010), now includes chapters on more than eleven; for
more on “world religions” as a category, see below.
9. Charles Taliaferro, one of this volume’s co-editors, is also the author of the phi-
losophy of religion essay in Segal’s volume—a chapter that offers pretty much a
summary of this largely Christian approach to the field, focusing on such topics
as eternity, the goodness of God, the proofs, theodicy, and the challenges and
opportunities of religious pluralism.
10. Although she is not cited, Sharf’s critique shares a great deal with the work of
the historian Joan Wallach Scott; see, for example, her influential article “The
Evidence of Experience” (1991). For a critical response to Sharf’s approach, see
Gyatso (1999); although drawing on Tibetan literature on experience as evidence
that such Buddhist discourses are not simply cultural imports (as Sharf argues),
Gyatso nonetheless leaves in place Sharf’s main point: Rhetorics of experience
are devices for maintaining social boundaries.
11. The early (and, for some, continuing) popularity of the hermeneutical model is
thus apparent; much as a 19th-century anthropologist tried to reconstruct the
original context in which a “survival” must have once made sense, hermeneutics
seemed the only way to reconstruct the long-lost meaning that the dead symbol
must have once had.
12. This alternative approach to studying experience (i.e., studying the discourse on
experience) is elaborated in Martin and McCutcheon 2012.
13. For some, citing Stark and Žižek to support the same point will surely appear
odd. Although it cannot detain us here, it may be worth considering changes
in the causal role played by the category “belief” in Stark’s work, notably in his
more recent writings in which the beliefs of participants, expressed in their
180 Notes
authoritative doctrines, are understood to motivate their behavior (e.g., his con-
clusion that the beliefs of early Christians motivated what he understands as their
superior behaviors), thereby allowing Christianity to win out in the competitive
Hellenistic religious economy. In his words: “Central doctrines of Christianity
prompted and sustained attractive, liberating, and effective social relations and
organizations” (Stark 1996: 211).
14. As evident from table 2.1, Hinnells’s and Segal’s volumes are organized around
the same two- part division: the first devoted to disciplinary approaches and the
second concerned with either issues (e.g., new religious movements, religion
and science, religion and culture, in the case of Hinnells’s) or topics (e.g., heaven
and hell, magic, nationalism and religion, in the case of Segal’s). In fact, the over-
lap between these two volumes is the greatest among those in the genre, with
seven of each book’s opening nine essays being on the very same items (i.e., the-
ology, philosophy of religion, sociology of religion, anthropology of religion, psy-
chology of religion, phenomenology of religion, and comparative religion [called
comparative method in Segal’s volume]). Although writing an overview of each
of these subfields presents a challenging opportunity for any author, it is not
clear that reading more than one such survey provides one with anything more
than insight into authors’ inevitably idiosyncratic views of their methodological
homes.
15. One could, however, raise an objection to the use of the virtually limitless (and
thus arbitrary) “religion and . . .” rubric, most evident in The Routledge Companion,
in which we find essays on “religion and” the arts, cognition, culture, geography,
Orientalism, politics, and science. With the newly expanded annual program for
the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in mind, one can easily come up with
a host of other “religion and . . .” topics that likely deserve a place as much as
any of those already included in the book. For instance, consider that the AAR’s
2006 program units include “religion and” the social sciences, lesbian-feminist
issues, person and culture, disability studies, ecology, popular culture, film and
visual culture, holocaust and genocide, medicine and healing, social conflict
and peace, science and technology, animals, childhood studies, colonialism,
sexuality, media and culture, public policy and political change. For a critique
of the unregulated nature of the “religion and . . .” rubric, see McCutcheon 2001:
179–199.
16. The normative, political engine that drives such classifications is the topic
explored throughout McCutcheon 2005.
17. Interestingly, Taylor himself uses this phrase concerning the complexity of our
technical terminology: “But even when lines of definition seem to be clearly
drawn, terms remain irreducibly complex” (16).
18. We are reminded here of Lincoln’s fifth thesis on method: “Reverence is a reli-
gious, and not a scholarly virtue. When good manners and good conscience can-
not be reconciled, the demands of the latter ought to prevail” (1996: 226); for
Notes 181
a critique of the mere “appearance of critical discourse analysis” in Lincoln’s

often-quoted theses, see Fitzgerald’s point-for-point rebuttal of “Theses on
Method” (2006).
19. This is a common move, as identified in our introduction, we see in the mod-
ern field (i.e., distinguishing between the singular and plural noun, sometimes
taking the form of distinguishing between the singular noun “religion” and
its adjectival form “religious”) that really adds nothing to theoretical debates.
If there are only religions—empirically observable instances that, following the
still influential lead of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, many of us refer to simply as
traditions—then of what are they instances? That is, what do they share in com-
mon that justifies their being named the same thing? And where does that com-
monality reside—in the so-called traditions themselves or in the minds of the
persons doing the classification? Without clarification on just these questions,
the plural/singular issue is simply a distraction.
20. The answer to the title’s question turns out to be that “the study of religions is a
key to understanding other cultures” (19). If we survey how departments of reli-
gious studies justify their existence or portray themselves on their websites and
in their promotional literature, we will find that this is a common-enough reason
to study religion. For instance, see the AAR-supported/Lilly Endowment-funded
website “Why Study Religion?” where, on the opening page, we learn that we
study it because “[r]eligion has always been with us (emphasis original). Throughout
history, it has expressed the deepest questions human beings can ask, and it has
taken a central place in the lives of virtually all civilizations and cultures” (http://
www.studyreligion.org/why/index.html).
21. McCutcheon has written elsewhere of the troubles of assuming that, for example,
the ancient Arabic term “din” means religion (2005: 38–40; see also Nongbri 2012:
39 ff); a useful example of the problems associated with reading modern categories
backward in time, as if they capture some essential feature, is provided by Hinnells
when he writes: “In the case of Zoroastrianism ‘religion’ is appropriate since there
is a term (den) that it is reasonable to translate as ‘religion’” (7). Why it is reason-
able we are not told, nor are his readers informed of just when, why, and according
to whom “Zoroastrianism” was classified as a distinct zone known as a religion.
22. We say this, in part, because on a surprising number of occasions, Prothero uses
what probably strikes many scholars of religion as the long-outdated theological
phrases “Christianity and other religions” and “non-Christian religions” (e.g., 6,
14, 17, 23, 143)—a usage that nicely reinforces his intended reader’s assumptions
concerning just what occupies the normative center.
23. With Prothero and, not long before him, Bart Erhman in mind, there is surely a
study to be written on the significance of scholars of religion appearing on “The
Daily Show with John Stewart.”
24. The lack of utility for such categories is evident in the author’s definition for
tribal, or traditional, religions: They “involve belief in some power or powers
182 Notes
beyond humans, to which they can appeal for help. Examples include the souls of
the departed, and spirits living on mountains, in stones, trees, or animals.” Apart
from the problem of this being a poorly disguised reworking of the 19th-century
notion of animism as constituting the most basic or archaic form of religion, it is
only the presumed authority of the Christian message (evidenced, we presume,
in its “universalizing” success) that enables Christianity to avoid being desig-
nated as a tribal religion, what with such seemingly classic traditional features as
its notion of God, intercessory prayer, the incarnation, and the afterlife.
25. For a further discussion of the socio-rhetorical utility of the term “pagan,” along
with such equally polemical terms as “provincial,” “heathen,” and “gentile,” see
McCutcheon 2003: xiii.
26. We are indebted to Craig Martin for pointing out Edward Schiappa’s interesting
volume on this topic (2003).
c h a p t er 3
1. As Jonathan Z. Smith has noted (see especially Smith 1990), anything can be
compared to anything else inasmuch as the criteria that drive the comparison
are the property of the curious comparativist, rather than essential features of the
items being compared. The issue at hand, therefore, is really what specific com-
mon features of similarity (and difference) might be drawn between “religion”
and Disney, not whether the two are comparable.
2. The usage here is strongly influenced by Max Weber’s distinction between sub-
stantive rationality (which is positive in the sense used above) and instrumental
rationality (which is not). See Weber 1947: 184–186.
3. By “liberal,” we do not mean the opposite of “conservative,” as is so often meant
in contemporary discourse, but rather the set of political assumptions that have
come to dominate western democracies within the last several centuries, as
exemplified, for example, by the writings of John Locke, the U.S. Declaration of
Independence, or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The liberal stance
on morality is classically expressed by Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason
([1788] 1956). The origins of “modernity” or the modern condition signaled by
these political assumptions are clearly to be associated with the genesis of capi-
talism, but the precise character of this relationship and the question of its date
need not be addressed for the purposes of this discussion.
4. See the concise statement of Steve Bruce (1998: 23): “By modernization, I refer
to a historically and geographically specific package of major social, political and
economic changes that came with urbanization and industrialization in Western
Europe, and to the form of consciousness associated with those changes.”
5. We assume here and throughout that the entities “modernity” and “postmoder-
nity” refer to broad sociopolitical conditions of life and that the intellectual prop-
ositions associated with these respective tags are functions of a general change
in sensibilities to correspond to these new conditions. See Harvey 1990.
Notes 183
6. As a result, “religion” will never be capable of successful reduction, simply

because the category is made up of wholly heterogeneous elements. It seems
to us that the only possibility for an ultimate reduction (and thus intellectually
acceptable understanding) of “religion” would require a thorough redefinition,
or even rejection, of the term as currently understood. In some ways, the chap-
ters of the present volume could be understood to be modeling what such a
reduction might look like.
7. This self-presentation of the liberal state is, in fact, rather duplicitous. The pre-
tense is to a value-free coercive apparatus that serves only to protect the individu-
ally chosen values of its citizens, but in fact this “negative” orientation rules out
any “positive” choices that stand at odds with liberal values themselves. To put it
even more starkly, liberalism allows for free individual choice, but only insofar
as the choices in question conform to liberal values. In addition, of course, lib-
eralism’s “negativity” hides its positive valuation of the liberal system itself. An
excellent statement of these limitations may be found in Fish 1999.
8. This is not to say that individuals do not carry away with them the traces of this
numinous “sacred space” in the form of photographs, mementos, and mem-
ories. But the same is true, naturally, of religious institutions as well. Relics,
memorabilia, and even applied religious ethics are ways of taking pieces of the
special, segregated “sacred” and bringing them to bear on ordinary, supposedly
“profane” aspects of life. The segregated space is imagined to have an impact on
“ordinary life,” in spite of its own very special and restricted character.
9. Jean Baudrillard also points out that simulation (on which, see further below)
is dangerous to reality as reality, insofar as it implies that there may not be any
reality underlying representation. Thus the segregation of Disney World from
“reality” serves to protect and even underscore that reality itself has a substantial
presence. See especially Baudrillard 1993: 197:
For example: it would be interesting to see whether the repressive appara-
tus would not react more violently to a simulated hold-up than to a real one?
For the latter only upsets the order of things, the right of property, whereas
the other interferes with the very principle of reality. Transgression and
violence are less serious, for they only contest the distribution of the real.
Simulation is infinitely more dangerous, however, since it always suggests,
over and above its object, that law and order themselves might really be nothing
more than a simulation. (emphasis original)
This is essentially the claim of this book: that the distinction of a realm of “unre-
ality” (religion) serves to create and underscore the “reality” of its opposite.
10. And, in fact, the fantastic “outside” of Disney World is actually contained within
the “real” world, which is the metaphoric “inside” it serves to retrench, much as
“nature” is not only contained but defined in the form of New York City’s Central
Park as a geometric and artificial segregation or marking off within the confines
of the urban landscape itself. Thus Yi-Fu Tuan (1997: 191–192) notes that the
184 Notes
closest cultural parallels to the Disney phenomenon are not so much the rowdy,
urban, Coney Island-like amusement parks in decay, but rather the European
princely gardens of the Renaissance and early modern period (i.e., from about
1500 to 1800; Versailles is an especially striking example), which aimed, in their
distortion and circumscription of nature for the sake of aesthetic requirements
or the capacity for amusement, to re-create Eden. He states:
The great European garden is an idealized world separated from both
nature and the city, and also from the frustrating social imbroglios within
the main house, to which the garden is attached. . . . Certain fundamental
similarities between the premodern European garden and the modern
Disney theme park can be seen in the architectural and engineered charac-
ter of the historic gardens. Their builders did not hesitate to distort nature
if by doing so they could make it more aesthetic and amusing. (191–192)
We should see the establishment of such gardens as a preeminent effect and
expression of, precisely, modernity.
11. See Adams 1991: 144–145: “The Magic Kingdom’s Main Street is a musical-comedy
stage that places the visitor within a movie set. Like Disneyland’s Main Street,
it does not attempt to simulate reality. The buildings are visual images of ideal
types; they generate the idea of a prosperous turn-of-the-century town without
conflict, poverty, natural decay, mud, or any problems. It is a mythic conception
with only minimal basis in fact.”
12. One could, of course, make manifold and productive comparisons between
the simulacrum and the mystification of the commodity form as described by
Marx (1990: 163–177), thus further drawing out the connections between Disney
World’s proliferation of simulacra and the characteristics of religion. And this
comparison of the simulacrum with the commodity form as such would in turn
suggest that perhaps the simulacrum is more deeply embedded within moder-
nity than its postmodern theorization might suggest (so also, in fact, Baudrillard
1993: 195, 199) and that, in that context, it serves a very particular—covert and
exclusionary, or peripheralizing—function. But, in any case, the point here is the
much simpler one that the reproduction of a world that does not and never did
exist serves the same very useful exclusionary social function served by catego-
rizing some cultural expression as a distinct subtype: religion.
13. Even “religious” people, in the context of modernity, will often define their reli-
giosity in terms of sets of beliefs, rather than in terms of the reference of those
beliefs to actual objects in the world. One may wholly insist on the existence of
a deity or deities and still present one’s “religious” beliefs in terms of simulation
rather than reference. Note Baudrillard’s similar comments on media coverage
of “news events”:
Thus all hold-ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation
hold-ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decod-
ing and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of
Notes 185
presentation and possible consequences. In brief, they function as a set of

signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their
“real” goal at all. (1993: 198, emphasis added)
14. It may turn out that the same is true of simulation in a postmodern world and
that Baudrillard is too optimistic in his claim that simulation threatens power.
One could see, for instance, that calling into question the reality of the entire
legal apparatus (the example Baudrillard uses—see note 9 above) might actually
have conservative rather than destabilizing implications.
15. This phenomenon has its own material and not-very-mysterious causes. The
first appearances of discernibly “postmodern” cultural orientations can be traced
to the early-to-mid-1970s and so, of course, can the conceptual and even politi-
cal dissolution of the nation-state as a primary political entity. In addition, this
same period is marked by the actual cessation of states’ ability to control their
own finances (with the 1971 breakdown of the Bretton-Woods agreement and the
consequent 1973 adoption of a flexible exchange rate system; see Harvey 1990:
164–165). Specifically, various inflationary crises in the early 1970s brought about
the deregulation of relative currency values. As a result, modern western states
no longer have immediate political control of their own financial policies.
16. We must stress that in making this point, we are by no means arguing that cur-
rent “postmodern” discourses on identity are strongly distinct in their structure
or substance from modernist, citizen-oriented notions of identity. The point here
is that the discourse has changed somewhat, the touchstones for identity are
being found in different places, and arguments for identity are being made, at
times, in different ways. We should also stress that the increasing shift of sover-
eignty away from the nation-state, the increasing inability of sovereign nations to
actually make political and economic decisions for themselves, does not remove
the nation from the stage of international or domestic affairs: The state remains
the best structure for mobilizing and implementing decisions about most large
projects, including war (even when the war in question is undertaken by a non-
state agency, such as the UN or NATO) and the recent American bailouts of large
banks, in which state funds (collected from citizens) were used to keep nonstate
and noncitizen institutions (the banks in question) afloat.
17. It is notable that this increasingly positive orientation of the state, or of nonvol-
untary social collectives, is made possible within a capitalist economic system
precisely because of the progressive diminution of the sovereignty of the state.
18. An example that comes immediately to mind is the Nation of Islam, which
promotes a racially based identity classification and uses a specific “religious”
tradition (Islam) and religious imagery and behavior to foster, retrench, and sym-
bolize that identity. A more strictly modern “political” entity (e.g., the Democratic
Party, defined in terms of party membership and personal political convictions,
and not in terms of race or other “organic” identity markers) would presumably
be unable to appeal to religious imagery to symbolize its identity or mark its
186 Notes
distinction from other institutions. Note that Derrida seems to regard an appar-
ent resurgence of religious sensibility as a very recent hallmark of the times we
live in and that, moreover, he associates this recent religious feeling with the
sorts of (politically nonmodern) identity markers of language, ethnicity, and the
like: “Now if, today, the ‘question of religion’ actually appears in a new and differ-
ent light, if there is an unprecedented resurgence, both global and planetary, of
this ageless thing, then what is at stake is . . . an idiom that above all is inseparable
from the social nexus, from the political, familial, ethnic, communitarian nexus,
from the nation and from the people from autochthony, blood and soil, and from
the ever more problematic relation to citizenship and the state” (1998: 4). See
also Harvey 1990: 171, 292.
19. See Venturi et al. 1972. On the import of this text for postmodern architecture,
see, among others, Harvey 1990: 39–40, 59–60; Jameson 1991: 2. Venturi is
actually quoted in an article in The New York Times Magazine (1972: 41), “Mickey
Mouse Teaches the Architects,” as saying, “Disney World is nearer to what peo-
ple really want than anything architects have ever given them. It’s a symbolic
American Utopia.”
20. See Harvey 1990: 87: “It is indeed the case that the preoccupation with identity,
with personal and collective roots, has become far more pervasive since the early
1970s because of widespread insecurity in labor markets, in technological mixes,
credit systems, and the like.”
21. More pointedly and rather more ominously, Harvey states that “the greater the
ephemerality, the more pressing the need to discover or manufacture some kind
of eternal truth that might lie therein. The religious revival that has become
much stronger since the late sixties, and the search for authenticity and authority
in politics (with all of its accoutrements of nationalism and localism and of admi-
ration for those charismatic and ‘protean’ individuals with their Nietzschean ‘will
to power’) are cases in point” (1990: 292).
22. In contrast, see Harvey (1990: 43) for a chart comparing the features of mod-
ernism to those of postmodernism. In that chart, “participation,” as opposed to
“distance,” is cited as a feature of postmodernism over against modernism. This
is an accurate characterization in terms of the basic aesthetic values of postmod-
ernism. These values can be understood as participatory in the sense that they
involve a “pop” aesthetic that appears to arise, organically, out of people’s lives as
they are lived. But the precise character of the cultural expressions that are cur-
rently arising out of people’s lives (at least in the developed West) reflects above
all the cultural predominance of television and the passivity—the centrality of
the role of spectator—engendered by it.
23. This is how we might understand, or reconceive, Baudrillard’s remarks on
Disneyland. His claim is that
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real”
America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the
Notes 187
social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland

is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real,
whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer
real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is
no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of
concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the
reality principle. (1994: 12–13)
There is no reason to doubt this particular conclusion, but it can be clarified some-
what by stating that what Disney-style fantasylands indicate is a pervasive consum-
eristic mode of appropriating—as commensurable and freestanding entities—all
aspects of social production, including the production of the social itself.
24. Adams (1991: 146) refers to the “lack of participatory activities (since most attrac-
tions engage only the eyes and ears)” in Disney World.
25. On which, see, for example, specifically with respect to religion, Baudrillard
(1993: 196): “What if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the
signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it
is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum,
never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninter-
rupted circuit without reference or circumference.”
26. This is most obvious in the case of EPCOT Center. See the comments of Adams
(1991: 149): Participation in EPCOT Center by the corporations was crucial to its
development, providing about $300 million, or more than a third of the total
initial EPCOT Center costs. Each corporation paid up to $25 million for the right
to affix its name to a pavilion. General Motors chairman Robert B. Smith felt
the investment would reap substantial rewards for his company through image
enhancement and product promotion. “World of Motion” accentuates and indeed
bombards visitors with the message that the private automobile advances indi-
vidual freedom.
c h a p t er 4
1. What became known as the National Defense Education Act of 1958 was signed
into law just 11 months after Sputnik’s launch and one month prior to the found-
ing of the National Aeronautical and Space Agency (NASA).
2. Although this anecdote relies on McCutcheon’s personal memory, it is confirmed
in a later paper by the same author, who once again makes use of the Sputnik
example (Miller 1999). For instance, he writes:
Forty-two years ago this nation responded forthrightly to a wake-up call in
education. Sputnik was the alarm. . . . It constituted a clarion call, a mandate
for scientific and technological education. In October of 1957, the first of
Soviet Russia’s spacecraft was launched, not only on the horizon of the
planet, but also in the consciousnesses, of Americans everywhere. And
188 Notes
America responded. For a third of a century, more than two educational

generations, this nation heeded the implicit mandate of Sputnik. The
United States achieved superiority and strength in science and technology,
able to respond to the needs of the world and to our needs. But the times
have changed. . . . America is experiencing in these postmodern, post-[C]old-
[War] times a second wake-up call, a clarion call, a mandate that is at least
of the magnitude of Sputnik. Nor now are science and technology what is
needed, though these too are always important. Now what is crucial, cru-
cial for the survival of our race and planet, has little to do with information
and data, with sound bites or megabytes, not even with kilobytes and giga-
bytes. We now need to know and think through the myths that divide, and
understand the mythology that unites. For myth—the stories remembered,
beloved, and believed by young and old, male and female, from long ago
and from yesterday, north and south, east and west—such stories (however
out of date) are vessels which carry the ultimate signification of what is,
at its lowest and highest, most human. . . . [Joseph] Campbell and [James]
Hillman sensed the need for myth when we were responding to Sputnik
with science. . . . We are now called by our postmodern crises to education in
mythology just as surely and just as crucially as the Sputnik of a modern
time called America to education in science and technology. The world of
activisms is giving us an archetypal wake-up call.
3. As phrased in the opening lines of Frances Saunders’s book, The Cultural Cold
War:
During the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government committed vast
resources to the secret programme of cultural propaganda in western
Europe. A central feature of this programme was to advance the claim that
it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage
arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centrepiece of this covert cam-
paign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael
Josselson from 1950 to 1967. Its achievements—not least its duration—
were considerable. At its peak, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had
offices in [35] countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over
[20] prestige magazines [and funded a “clearing house” for the worldwide
distribution of such other cultural periodicals as Partisan Review, Kenyon
Review, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas,
Daedalus, etc.], held art exhibitions, owned a news and feature service, orga-
nized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and
artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the
intelligentsia of western Europe away from its lingering fascination with
Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of “the
American way.” (Saunders 1; see also 333 for the list of journals included in
the Congress “world family of magazines”)
Notes 189
4. In Holbrook’s hands, this same argument is presented as follows: “A scholar need

not feel charged with the responsibility of saving civilization, although more than
one has moved his age into new and fruitful channels of human effort. . . . His duty,
more modestly put, is to lay before his generation his knowledge and assessment
of the past, its appalling failures and disfigurements of the human and divine
images no less than its highest aspirations and spiritual achievements” (289).
This normative role suggests an affinity between Holbrook’s scholar of religion
circa 1965 and that of such later writers as Carl Raschke, who argue that schol-
ars of religion ought to identify “aberrations of religious thinking and behavior”
(1986: 136; for a critique of this view, see McCutcheon 1997a).
5. Although a specific type of politics can now be understood to be driving argu-
ments that establish these particular linkages, to writers from this historical per-
iod, these associations were self-evident and the result of what they considered to
be value-free research. As Holbrook writes later in his book, in an attempt to argue
against those who held that the study of religion ought to be a form of religious
pluralism directed toward mutual self-understanding of Protestantism, Roman
Catholicism, and Judaism (the United States’ pre-eminent religions in the early
1960s):
The notion that the university’s offerings and its employment of person-
nel should be controlled by the aim of reflecting cultural conditions out-
side the university is a fallible principle. Nowhere else does it hold. . . .
[T]he university operates on a principle of selectivity, the criteria of which
are established by the institution itself. . . . Insofar as the university cher-
ishes and makes effective the ideal of serving as the critic and leader of a
vital culture, it must retain its autonomy. (178)
This quotation nicely demonstrates the rhetorical utility of the sui generis strat-
egy (i.e., the argument concerning the autonomy of the university and its ideals
from historical pressures) insomuch as it is a way of insulating this institution
from one set of cultural influences while—at least when judged from today’s van-
tage point—it had long before internalized yet another set of cultural influences
(e.g., the crisis in democracy that required the intervention of the humanist).
Specifically, Holbrook effectively uses this rhetoric of autonomy to distinguish
the emerging humanistic study of religion (i.e., the study of religion as providing
access to a deep and enduring aspect of the human experience) from the previ-
ously existing confessional study of religion as carried out in (largely Protestant,
sometimes evangelical) divinity schools.
6. Although much has been written on, for example, the direct impact of Cold War
funding and U.S. security needs and the invention of such pursuits as area studies
and international studies, almost no research has gone into the Cold War’s impact
on the study of religion.
7. Neusner attributes this “reinvention” to explicit Cold War needs: “The Cold
War required us to understand the faith and life of strangers. . . . The field of the
190 Notes
academic study of religion was reinvented in the United States, the first natu-
rally, authentically multicultural field America would produce” (23). Although we
believe that the content of the field may indeed have been directed by such Cold
War needs (something McCutcheon has discussed in print, e.g., 1997b: 163; see
also Martin 2001), in this book we are interested solely in the establishment of
the institutional structure in which various forms of the publicly funded study of
religion were carried out. Distinguishing among the various types of scholarship
carried out within these units, and then arguing for the priority of any one in
particular, is a separate project.
8. Saunders is quoting John Kobler, Henry Luce: His Time, Life, and Fortune (London:
Macdonald, 1968).
9. For example, although we would not necessarily criticize departments for seeing
current interest in the relevance of Arabic civilization as an opportunity to press
university administrations for adding much-needed (and sadly absent) faculty
to their departments, the manner in which religious studies departments all too
often normalize one particular type of Islam (one that is generally open to cap-
italist investment, liberal democratic values, and thus understood as “tolerant”
and “pluralistic”) is very problematic. It is problematic because of the manner
in which it legitimizes only one type of Islam—not surprisingly the one that
furthers our own national interests—as if it was an extension of some originary
essence, all at the expense of other equally legitimate, historical forms of Islam
that, after they pass through our lens, are understood as aberrant, deviant, fun-
damentalist, extremist, fanatical, and thus derivative and wrong. On this point,
see McCutcheon 2004 and 2005.
10. For example, like almost all histories of the field, Hart’s (1999) makes little or no
reference to the wider sociopolitical context in which the nonconfessional study
of religion developed in the United States. Although this frame of reference (what
we are characterizing as a “history of ideas” approach, somewhat akin to the
“great books” approach in some liberal arts curricula) is hardly wrong, the almost
exclusive reliance on this one scale of analysis in forming our self-understanding
seems to be one of the ways in which we authorize (i.e., dehistoricize) our prac-
tices by disconnecting them from their contingent conditions.
11. The Pew database can be searched at: http://www.pewtrusts.org/program_
investments_database.aspx?image=img3&program_area_id=7 (accessed August
10, 2011).
12. If pressed, we would argue that although these two issues can be separated ana-
lytically, they are intimately related. Although it is not our intention to support
a deterministic reading (i.e., that the contents of these units and topics under
investigation in research and teaching were wholly determined by their structure
and source of funding), the broad parameters set by the ways in which these
units were structured and reproduced made certain sorts of scholarship not just
unpopular but, perhaps, unimaginable. If we were to rely on the analogy of a
Notes 191
language’s grammar and the possible meaning of its sentences and words, even
grammatically transgressive instances of language use (e.g., slang, swearing,
etc.) still conform to the larger set of conditions that make meaning possible.
Therefore, studies that separate structure from content, although analytically
useful, have their limitations.
13. These numbers are derived from the actual allocations reported each year. In
many cases, the congressional authorization was for considerably more funds
than were requested.
14. Interestingly, in the midst of his own argument concerning the essential role
played by the humanistic study of religion in fulfilling the university’s “liberaliz-
ing” function, Holbrook also points out the demographic argument: “Nor should
it be overlooked that increasing numbers of students find their way to publicly
supported institutions, a fact which makes more imperative the need for provid-
ing first-rate opportunities for study of crucially important segments of culture,
including, of course, religion” (174).
15. An example of but one pre-Sputnik, post-WWII reform-minded work on U.S.
education is Bernard Iddings Bell’s Crisis in Education (1949). “If our civilization
is to . . . survive,” Bell speculated, “it will be saved . . . by leaders of trained intel-
ligence” (63; cited also by Dow 11). Among the proposals that Bell believed would
save “our civilization”—a phrase nicely at home with other forms of Cold War
rhetoric—was religious teaching in the nation’s school system.
16. The schools receiving 1959–1960 NDFs in English were: the University of
Arkansas (5), Claremont Graduate School (5), University of Southern California
(8), University of Connecticut (8), University of Notre Dame (6), University
of Kansas (3; this includes English/folklore), University of Mississippi (4),
Washington University (5), SUNY, Buffalo (3), University of Rochester (5),
Duke University (5), Western Reserve University (4), University of Oklahoma
(3), University of Pennsylvania (5), Rice University (5), and Texas Technological
College (3). Also, in 1961–1962, a total of 102 NDF grants were eligible to be
awarded in English alone, plus 19 more in comparative literature, making a total
of roughly 10 percent of all new NDF awards for that school year (see National
Defense Graduate Fellowships, Approved Graduate Programs, 1961–2).
17. According to the NDEA documents that list the doctoral programs eligible to
receive NDFs for doctoral work in religion, four programs qualified in 1961–1962
(State University of Iowa [Biblical and Judaeo-Christian studies], Duke [church
history and Christian ethics], Claremont Graduate School [history and philoso-
phy of religion], and Brown [religious studies]), receiving 10 awards total. Three
additional programs of relevance to the study of religion also qualified under
the general heading of “humanities: other”: Near Eastern and Judaic studies at
Brandeis; Buddhist studies at the University of Wisconsin; and Hebrew culture
and education: Judaeo-Arabic studies at NYU. That same year, of the 29 humani-
ties programs that lost their previous NDF eligibility, three were in one or another
192 Notes
area of the study of religion: Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning
(previously eligible for studying comparative religion), Emory (previously eligible
for Old Testament), as well as Union Theological Seminary (previously eligible
for theology). Moreover, the following year (1962–1963), no programs in reli-
gion were listed as eligible. (See National Defense Graduate Fellowships: Approved
Graduate Programs, 1961–2; National Defense Graduate Fellowships: Approved
Graduate Programs, 1962–3.)
18. It should be noted that on October 16, 1962, this section—reproducing the lan-
guage from the National Science Foundation Act of 1950—was amended. This
was the result of 20 institutions that, as of December 1961, had withdrawn from
participating in the loan program (though, significantly, not from the NDF pro-
gram [see Orlan 286, n. 11]), along with nine institutions that had never partici-
pated, all due to the required disclaimer affidavit. An additional eight (already
participating) schools had made their opposition to the required disclaimer
known as well (Orlan 285, n. 10). As phrased in the NDEA report for fiscal year
1963: “The feeling that the requirement implied unfair suspicion of students as
a group and violated standards of academic freedom had caused 32 colleges to
refuse to participate in the Student Loan Program by the beginning of the 1962–
1963 academic year” (1964: 2). As observed by Orlan, it was only after Harvard
and Yale withdrew from the program—long after other schools had withdrawn—
that the issue received national attention, prompting a congressional hearing and
a change in law (286). Despite the amendment, the law retained the oath and,
in step with the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950, made it a crime for an
applicant for, or a recipient of, an NDF to be a member of a group registered with
the Subversive Activities Control Board. The crime carried a maximum $1,000
fine, a maximum term of five years in prison, or both (U.S. Statutes at Large 1962:
Public Law 87–835, Oct. 16, 1962).
19. It is important to note that arguments in favor of developing a humanistic study
of religion date to the early 1960s as well; see Geddes MacGregor’s article, in
which he discusses the development of “a truly free school of Religion,” entitled
“Graduate Study in Religion and the University of Southern California,” pub-
lished in the Journal of Bible and Religion 30/2 (1962).
20. See the opening pages to chapter 13, “Evaluation of the Situation in Religion
Scholarship,” which are concerned with identifying (and proposing steps to
eliminate) the inferiority complex within U.S. scholarship on religion. “American
scholars,” Holbrook writes, “sometimes tend to be ill at ease when comparisons
are made between them and foreign scholars. Some feel that the supreme acco-
lade for their work can only come from abroad and others accept as a fact their
secondary status as scholars. Still others are irritated at what they believe to be
the highhanded manner in which European scholars especially refuse to take
seriously the works produced in America” (257). Coming at a time when the
United States. was flexing its unilateral geopolitical muscles for the first time,
Notes 193
just as the study of religion was also trying to come of age, and not too long after
the cult of U.S. economic and cultural supremacy was dealt a severe setback by
the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, these comments on the deficient produc-
tivity of scholars of religion, and their longtime dependence on European schol-
arship, seem particularly important. In fact, several of the authors in Ramsey’s
companion volume—notably, Ashby writing on the “History of Religions” (7),
Nichols writing on the “History of Christianity” (158), and Welch writing on
“Theology” (284)—make much the same observation concerning the depen-
dency and the game of catch-up being played by mid-20th-century American
scholarship. Although descriptively accurate, it is difficult not to read these
authors’ depiction of U.S. scholars lagging behind their European mentors in
light of their goal of reinventing the confessional study of religion as a humanis-
tic enterprise. Focusing on the deficient amount of scholarship and the financial
conditions and altered teaching loads that could correct this problem more than
likely resonated with the injured pride (of citizens, government officials, private
granting agencies) that followed the launch of Sputnik in late 1957. For instance,
in the January 1958 words of Gabriel Heatter—syndicated news commentator for
the former Mutual Broadcasting System (1934–1999) who broadcast an editorial
addressed to Sputnik I following its fall from orbit—“You gave us a shock which
hit many people harder than Pearl Harbor. You hit our pride a frightful blow. You
suddenly made us realize that we are not the best in everything. You reminded
us of an old-fashioned American word, humility. You woke us up out of a long
sleep. . . . A nation, like a man, can grow soft and complacent. It can fall behind
when it thinks it is Number One in everything” (as quoted by Dickson 223). Such
words are not hard to understand when we take into account that, by the time
the United States successfully launched its first satellite, Vanguard (in March of
1958; it weighed a mere 21 pounds), the Soviets had already put Sputnik II into
orbit (on November 3, 1957), a half-ton rocket carrying a live dog, Laika.
21. Although there is little need to provide evidence for the widely recognized domi-
nance of Protestant theology in the late 1950s and early 1960s U.S. scholarship
on religion, consider that Claude Welch—in his essay on the state of the art in
theology—saw little need to take into account Roman Catholic or Jewish work
because neither of them “has as yet produced in America a major body of schol-
arship on theology in the strict sense of the term” (221).
22. A difference between our analysis and that of Wiebe presents itself at this point;
whereas he sees “a restructuring of the study of religion in the mid-1960s as
a result of the transformation of the National Association of Bible Instructors
(NABI) into the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and the motivation
for that reconstruction came from pressures upon NABI to move beyond its
Christian orientation in research and teaching” (Wiebe 2001: 274; see also Wiebe
1999a for a detailed study of the shift from NABI to the AAR), we would inquire
into why, at this particular historical juncture, such a shift was deemed necessary,
194 Notes
desirable, or even possible. Placing this shift in the context of the Cold War fund-
ing opportunities at least begins to investigate what factors other than theologi-
cal lay behind this “motivation” and these “pressures.”
23. In the late 1950s, Medaris was the head of the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile
Agency.
24. E-mail (October 14, 2002) from Charles Reynolds, former chair, department of
religious studies, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to Russell McCutcheon.
As an aside we note that in the summer of 2003, McCutcheon learned that, in
1965 and just prior to its formal establishment as a thoroughly retooled depart-
ment of religious studies, his own department applied to the Danforth for such
funding (at the University of Alabama). Prior to that time, the department at
the University of Alabama was comprised of volunteer campus ministers and
local preachers who taught courses, the vast majority of which were on top-
ics in the history and practice of Christianity. We are not yet aware whether
Danforth funds were awarded. He thanks Betty Dickey for bringing these files
to his attention.
25. Founded by Mr. and Mrs. William H. Danforth, the Foundation’s 1958 report
elaborates on the mission of the organization:
[T]o strengthen and enrich Education, particularly Higher Education, in
its outreach to the American student and to our American Society. . . . The
Foundation is eager to aid in the search for moral and spiritual values within
both the curricular and extracurricular life of the student. . . . Furthermore,
it believes that some experience with religion, both in its reach of compas-
sion to one’s [sic] fellow-man and the reach of faith to a Divine Being, is of
major importance in the formation of sturdy character and responsible cit-
izenship. . . . These fellowships to college teachers, campus religious work-
ers and students preparing themselves for college teaching are intended to
increase academic competence and spiritual awareness. (1958: 2–3)
26. We are indebted to Kay Dusenbert, the grants/programs manager for the
Danforth Foundation (St. Louis, MO), for providing copies of selected pages
from their past annual reports. The quotations are from these documents.
27. We are reminded of former colleagues in a publicly funded university who
argued that, since the American Bible Society was nondenominational, its mis-
sion coincided with that of the field of religious studies.
28. For example, at which point in its history did the Danforth Foundation fund
not just campus ministry initiatives but also religion departments in public
universities, as well as programs in the humanities? Were their criteria for
“new departments” in any way linked to the NDEA’s emphasis on funding new
programs? What sort of scholarship on religion was going on in these newly
devised programs that were in public institutions, and who was hired to their
faculties?
Notes 195
c h a p t er 5
1. Perhaps the best single essay overview of this emergent subfield is to be found in
Geertz 2004; Slone 2006 is also very helpful.
2. That Taves is hardly the only cognitively inclined scholar to bring these two
together (e.g., see, most recently, McNamara 2009; see also the essays collected in
Andresen 2001) needs to be said, of course.
3. As an aside, the many acronyms that appear in the writings of those who work in this
field are rather curious. Some common examples include TAVS (threat-activation
system), HADD (hyperactive agency detection device), VM (vestibular-motor) expe-
riences and sensations, and, of course, the widely cited TOM (theory of mind) and
MCI (minimally counterintuitive concepts). While effectively distinguishing the
initiated from the uninitiated, and thereby assisting to establish in-group/out-group
identities, this shorthand seems to lend a degree of scientific complexity and thus
legitimacy to this fairly new subfield. Although any intellectual pursuit has its own
technical vocabulary that its practitioners repeatedly employ in their work and, fur-
thermore, all technical vocabularies are the tips of large bodies of organized sets of
assumptions that scholars put into practice while carrying out their work (what we
might loosely call theories), not every field relies to such an extent on abbreviations to
do such heavy theoretical lifting—though perhaps there are some literary critics who,
when speaking to peers whom they assume well understand the trouble of assuming
that T (i.e., text) is a repository of an AIM (i.e., author’s intended meaning), simply
roll their eyes and say “AS IF” (i.e., always simplistic intentional fallacy).
4. It is not difficult to imagine the hardware/software metaphor (used to distinguish
biology from culture) soon sounding just as dated to our ears as does Marx’s archi-
tectural metaphor of base/superstructure. What both sets of metaphors share, of
course, is the effort to identify the prelinguistic and thus abiding real in distinc-
tion from the merely linguistic, the epiphenomenal.
5. Apart from what it identifies as the “old version” of the word (to signify illness),
the online Urban Dictionary (http://www.urbandictionary.com) indicates that the
word “sick” is now commonly used to signify the following partial list of syn-
onyms: awesome, sweet, nasty, gross, amazing, tight, wicked, vomit, dope, crazy,
disgusting, sex, rad, shit, puke, nice, hot, good, gnarly, bad, great, ugly, drunk,
fuck, insane, awesome, gay, fresh, fly, phat, dirty, badass, ass, mad, chill, etc.
6. Even if the minimally counterintuitive thesis held, then we could easily imagine
someone who feminists might once have called a male chauvinist pig remember-
ing another of the test phrases, “A girl that is wise,” for reasons unanticipated
by a more politically liberal researcher (because, for our hypothetical chauvinist,
female wisdom could very well be considered counterintuitive). What is the point?
Stimuli designed to signify uncontroversial, universal traits are, contrary to the
apparent hopes of the researcher, deeply embedded in socially variable worlds.
This point is discussed somewhat also in chapter 8.
196 Notes
7. Given that some recent studies have not supported the prediction that minimally
counterintuitive ideas are more memorable, we now find ourselves at an inter-
esting moment when this new field in the study of religion will be challenged
to live up to its scientific billing as being based on testability and falsifiability.
Simply put, as elegant as this theory is, how long will people continue to use if
there is increasing evidence to the contrary?
8. This, of course, amounts to the common critique of IQ and other standardized
tests in which information that is culturally and generationally specific to the
researcher is assumed to be universally shared among the test subjects. Playing
an edition of a trivia board game that is either too old or too young for its play-
ers or using dated popular-culture references to illustrate a point while teaching
illustrate the problem with making such an assumption.
9. See Wiebe 2010 for a survey of a neuropsychological theory of religion drawing
on ancient rock art.
10. We add the adjective here because some scholars make much of its difference
from the noun (as already signaled in our introduction), inasmuch as the adjec-
tive supposedly names a deeply human and thus universal quality of people
rather than the noun, which is thought to name only reified, impersonal institu-
tions (one would be correct to hear echoes of Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s critique
of “religion” in this widely used distinction; cf. chapter 6). We would argue that
this is purely a rhetorical distinction, as if saying that something is political (the
adjective) amounts to something other than asserting that politics (the noun)
exists. That the plurals of the noun (i.e., religions or Christianities) are often
favored over the singular is an equally suspect move, for it effectively bypasses
the question of definition and instead simply asserts the existence of a plurality,
as if this is a historically rigorous move. For example, speaking only of “birds”
naturalizes the presumption (rather than defending it and elaborating on it) that
the word/concept “bird,” in distinction from, say, plant, is useful. Settling the
question of its utility takes argumentation rather than a more detailed study of
the variety of birds.
11. Another worthwhile study would be to examine the manner in which scholars
have uncritically adopted other participant or folk taxonomies and the interests
that drive them, such as assuming that a local, participant term as “missionary”
is somehow a unique, apolitical social role and not simply an imperial social
actor benefiting from the cover of a particular form of social rhetoric.
12. Presumably, it is because this was the focus of McCutcheon’s first book,
Manufacturing Religion (1997), that results in it, at least up to now, being cited in
many works by cognitivist scholars of religion; such citations allow them to take
as given that the notion of sui generis ought to be abandoned, thereby opening
the door for their own explanatory work. That his subsequent work is rarely cited
by these writers—work that has argued that any use of the category of religion is
a sociopolitical technique of management—is, perhaps, to be expected.
Notes 197
13. Scholars of religion ought to be familiar with this. For instance, they are often
frustrated by specialists in other fields (e.g., political scientists) who, when
they venture to talk about religion, merely drag out what often amounts to a
Sunday-school level of expertise on the subject. This is the same frustration
that we are trying to identify but, this time, in the work of serious scholars of
religion.
14. It must be said that the recently assembled neurobiological toolbox has been
equally useful to members of all three of these groups—for entirely different
purposes, of course. Tracing the role of the Templeton Foundation in making
this work possible, for members of all three seemingly distinct groups, would be
a project well worth tackling.
15. The example of Whitehouse’s work relies on material from McCutcheon’s
“Religion Before ‘Religion’?” (2010a).
16. Taira (2010) and Nongbri (2012) provide excellent, recent examples of what our
work begins to look like when we make this switch to examining not religion but
rather the discourse on religion.
17. The growing field of biocriminology is being taken very seriously; for an over-
view, see Monaghan 2009.
18. Perhaps the parenthetical aside is too obvious a point, but it is worth stress-
ing; although much of our own work has consistently been on the very fact
that we think religion exists, we nevertheless find responses to our work that
assume that we are talking about religion, and not “religion.” For instance, most
recently Omer fails to understand that, in the work of McCutcheon’s that she
cites (Religion and the Domestication of Dissent [2005; cited by Omer 470]), men-
tions of religion always refer to the sociosemantic (i.e., discursive) systems that
enable one to think religion into existence rather than to actual things called reli-
gions (the latter being a product of the former). Compare also Riesebrodt 2010.
This category is so embedded in our way of seeing world (i.e., distinguishing
such things as good from bad, private from public, legitimate from illegitimate,
authentic from inauthentic, and, ultimately, us from them) that some readers
seem incapable of historicizing it.
c h a p t er 6
1. Durkheim constitutes something of an exception here; his definition of reli-
gion, whatever its problems, remains rigorously and thoroughly sociological and
hence leaves little “religious” in place to anchor it to the transcendent. See, e.g.,
Durkheim 1995: 34–35: “The division of the world into two domains, one con-
taining all that is sacred and the other all that is profane—such is the distinctive
trait of religious thought. . . . A rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a
house, in other words anything, can be sacred.”
198 Notes
2. Interestingly, Stowers echoes here the observation of Cantwell Smith (W. C.

Smith 1962: 110) that the term “religion” carries a sense of malaise with it.
3. This is stated clearly by Cantwell Smith (1962: 124), who claims that the student
of religion runs the risk of “omitting not only the vitality but the most significant
of all factors in that vitality, namely its relation with transcendence. The observ-
er’s concept of a religion is by definition constituted of what can be observed. Yet
the whole pith and substance of religious life lies in its relation to what cannot be
observed.” Jonathan Z. Smith likewise characterizes Cantwell Smith’s argument
as boiling down to this claim. See J. Z. Smith 2004a: 214, n.28.
4. The similarities between the claims of phenomenology of religion about its sub-
ject matter and those of Calvinist theology about the Eucharist are striking and
bear further investigation. For both, outer form is a vector for immaterial, spirit-
ual content, and that vector must not be confused or conflated with that content.
See Keane 2007: 61–65.
5. Strangely, Cantwell Smith’s demurrals are paralleled today in the popular phe-
nomenon of individuals claiming to be “spiritual, not religious.” This suggests
that Cantwell Smith, perhaps, is just as much a religious datum in need of expla-
nation as are the self-described “spiritual.” On this terminology and its signifi-
cance for our understanding of religion, see Klippenstein 2005.
6. Compare Marx (1990: 103): “The mystification which the dialectic suffers in
Hegel’s hands by no means prevents him from being the first to present its gen-
eral forms of motion in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is
standing on its head. It must be inverted, in order to discover the rational kernel
within the mystical shell.”
7. This is a fatal weakness of the otherwise-promising cognitive approaches: their
tendency to treat “religion” as a given, rather than the artificial and especially cul-
turally specific (i.e., Western and modern) category that it is. Note, for example,
the title of Boyer 1994: The Naturalness of Religious Ideas. This weakness of cogni-
tive approaches is discussed brilliantly in Bloch 2008. See, further, chapter 5.
8. An excellent example of such categorization is found in the discussion of zebras
offered under the rubric of “What, if anything, is a zebra?” in Gould 1983:
355–365.
9. This is especially so of Geertz’s definition (1966). The variety of attempts to cut
the Gordian knot by resorting to more “commonsense” and abrupt definitions of
religion as discourse pertaining to “superhuman” or “nonobvious” or “counter-
intuitive” beings is little more than a restatement of E. B. Tylor’s—also anthropo-
logical—definition of religion as discourse pertaining to “spiritual beings.”
10. See Boyarin 2008: 152–154, citing, among others, Gregory Nazianzen, Eusebius,
and Epiphanius. This early identification of the “invention” of religion is some-
what odd, but not unique—a number of theorists see in the initial separation of
ideological commitments from the state, found in nascent Christianity in part due
to its illegality and in a definition of cultural entities in terms of commitments to
Notes 199
and modes of worship of a given deity, a foreshadowing or even an initial fabrica-

tion of the modern notion of religion. Another oddity here is the allegation that a
“religion” invented “religion”; as if some entity viewed itself as unique and then
abstracted that uniqueness sufficiently to apply it to other entities.
11. Compare Masuzawa 2005: 29. For an example of how native political actions in
a colonial context can be redrawn as “religious” and, in the process, attenuated,
see McCutcheon 1997b: 167–177.
12. For an elaboration of this view, see, among others, Asad 1993; Fitzgerald 2007a,
2007b; McCutcheon 2003; and see chapters 1 and 3 in this volume.
13. Compare Benedict Anderson’s (2006) characterization of nation as an “imag-
ined community.”
14. That is, those it identifies as “religious,” in part because of their past association
with ecclesiastical institutions.
15. With the important caveat, noted above, that this “freedom” is in fact circumscribed
by the state itself, insofar as a practice or belief must be legally defined as religion to
be thus protected: The initial gesture of state noninvolvement is state definition.
16. We find such a focus in Dubuisson 2003; Fitzgerald 2007a; and King 1999. It is
also apparent in the emphases of Masuzawa 2005 and to some degree in Asad
1993.
17. Note too that among other things, this means that cultural influences never move
simply from the dominating to the dominated culture but instead are reciprocal.
This is a point made perhaps most forcefully by Marshall Sahlins (especially
1987), although others have noted it as well.
18. See Lincoln 2000: 120–121. See also his comments in the same piece (2000: 119)
specifically addressing the scholar’s descriptions of other cultures:
Reverence is a religious, and not a scholarly virtue. When good manners
and good conscience cannot be reconciled, the demands of the latter ought
to prevail. Many who would not think of insulating their own or their par-
ents’ religion against critical inquiry still afford such protection to other
people’s faiths, via a stance of cultural relativism. One can appreciate their
good intentions, while recognizing a certain displaced defensiveness, as
well as the guilty conscience of western imperialism.
19. This process is additionally complexified by the reciprocal nature of all cultural
exchanges (concerning which Sahlins has written a great deal). We are speaking
here only of the motivations and immediate consequences of European descrip-
tions of native practices to other Europeans.
20. For example, J. Z. Smith (1998: 179) refers to Gabriel Sagard’s (1632) Le grand
voyage du pays des Hurons as denying religion to Andean indigenous peoples.
Senior (2006: 279–280) refers to Samuel de Champlain’s (1603) Des sauvages
and Gabriel Sagard’s (1632) Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons for the idea that,
although North American natives may believe in God, they have no systematic
worship.
200 Notes
21. It may be used as such, as it clearly is in Smith’s own work, but this seems more
the exception than the rule.
22. This, in our view, is all that is accomplished for instance by the excruciating defi-
nitional efforts of Geertz (1966).
c h a p t er 7
1. For a transcript of the original, which aired on November 9, 2006, on PBS’s
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/
july-dec06/rumsfeld_11-09.html (accessed March 8, 2007).
2. During this January 11, 2006, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Rice said: “Now, as to the question of escalation, I think that I don’t
see it, and the president doesn’t see it, as an escalation. What he sees. . . .” Sen.
Chuck Hagel (Republican, Nebraska) interrupted at this point, asking: “Putting
22,000 new troops, more troops in, is not an escalation?” “I would call it, sena-
tor, an augmentation,” Rice replied.
3. For Michel de Certeau (1988: 117), “space” (espace) signifies a system of order as it
is put into practice by creative agents with varied interests, as opposed to “place”
(lieu), which signifies the system of order in its static or ideal sense—its pre-use
phase. Instead, we are using “space” somewhat like Mary Douglas uses “matter”—
to name a domain prior to its signification. Of course, that such a naming is itself
an act of signification goes without saying; “space” is therefore used merely to draw
attention to the fact that various senses of “place” are not natural or necessary.
4. This was quoted from the conference website (April 16, 2007). The chapter was
originally written for “Secularism and Beyond—Comparative Perspectives,” an
international conference at the University of Copenhagen, May 29–June 1, 2007.
See http://www.ku.dk/satsning/religion/sekularism_and_beyond/index.asp.
5. Keeping in mind Mary Douglas’s biting critique of Durkheim exempting his own
society’s’ cherished truths (i.e., science, mathematics, etc.) from his own social
analysis (see the preface to the first edition in Douglas 1999), we could say that
the fact of our being able to look upon the familiar with the same Durkheimian
eyes that we use to see the strange is evidence of the limitations of his original
work, as well as its profound influence on subsequent theorists.
6. This very point was nicely made by another conference participant, John Bowen,
in his book on the French headscarf controversy. Referring to the French term
“laïcité,” only roughly translated as “secularism,” he observes that, although
French politicians may speak of laïcité as a causal agent or explanatory principle,
“[it] does not . . . serve as a useful analytical tool. It makes no sense for a social
scientist or historian to ask, ‘Does this policy reinforce laïcité?’” (2007: 2). Why?
Because, as he points out not long after, “there is no historical actor called ‘laïcité’:
only a series of debates, laws, and multiple efforts [on the part of various social
participants with differing interests] to assert claims over public space” (33).
Notes 201
7. For example, consider Fasolt’s fascinating paper (2004b), in which he uses

the scholarly categories of sacred/profane (understood as devices that humans
employ cross-culturally to address the inevitable gap between knowledge of self
and knowledge of other/reality [17–19]) as the organizing rubric to compare the
social role of the modern church/state separation to the medieval clerics/laity
division of authority.
8. The student later remarked that among the things said by the speaker that struck
him as curious was her use of the notion of “checks and balances”—which he
understood as a particularly modern, American way of talking about governmen-
tal process and regulation—to describe the workings of authority within precolo-
nial African traditional society.
9. Of course, such debates are neither limited to North America nor the 19th cen-
tury. For example, consider the European Union’s Council Directive 2001/113/
EC (December 20, 2001) involving the sale and export of fruit jams, jellies, mar-
malades, and purées. Under this directive, carrots (not to mention rhubarb and
sweet potatoes) can be defined as fruit—why? Apparently because carrot jam
is a Portuguese delicacy! See Annex 3.A.1 of the Official Journal of the European
Communities for the full text, which can also be found at http://eurlex.europa.eu/
LexUriServ/site/en/oj/2002/l_010/l_01020020112en00670072.pdf (accessed
August 17, 2011).
10. Or, as Smith goes on to write: “Increased mastery of non-European languages
led by the latter part of the eighteenth century to a series of translations and edi-
tions of religious texts. Missionaries, colonial officials, and travelers contributed
ethnographic descriptions. Encyclopedias of religions, lexica, and handbooks
(the latter, frequently bearing the title ‘History of Religions’) were produced to
organize these materials” (1998: 275).
11. This point is nicely made by Chidester in his historical study of comparative
religion in colonial-era southern Africa (1996). Unfortunately, much like some
authors already cited, he recognizes the historical nature of our terminology while
yet universalizing to what it supposedly points, as when he faults early colonialists’
failure to “recognize the existence of indigenous religions in southern Africa” (xv).
If “religion”—both word and concept—is part of a bundle of conceptual and social
relations that we trace to early modern Europe, then “indigenous religions” is no
longer a neutral descriptor, as it is used by such scholars. Instead, it is an imperial
move to project backward in time not only our local taxon but also the social inter-
ests that drive it and the social relations that it helps to make possible.
12. See the preface, introduction, and last chapter of McCutcheon 2003 on the man-
ner in which the invention of privacy—whether architectural, as in a private
room, or psychological, as in the private self—can be understood as a strategic
political device for managing dissent while simultaneously projecting an image
of social harmony. These themes are then elaborated upon in McCutcheon 2005.
An analogous if not identical argument is made in chapter 3 here.
202 Notes
13. For example, as phrased by Sullivan, “[t]here is no accepted legal way of talking
in the United States about the vast array of religious beliefs and practices that are
represented” (2005: 100). Although for some, this may seem to be a shortcoming
of U.S. law, according to this chapter, the lacuna is necessary and inevitable.
14. This helps us to understand why the liberal democratic nation-state so easily
grants freedom of belief, or conscience, to its citizens; despite the common-
sense view that ideas and beliefs are substantive items in the real world, they are
immaterial, ineffective, and thus freely entertained. After all, ideas do not think
themselves into existence; for this reason, they can largely be exchanged without
regulation, which is more than we can say for the bodies and associations needed
to think such ideas into existence and put them into practice. As evidence, con-
sider the U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1878, Reynolds v. U.S. (98 U.S. 145),
in which Mr. Reynolds’s belief in polygamy was not at issue; rather, it was his
practice of it—despite being a sincere Mormon—that was outlawed. Making ref-
erence to this earlier decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, in a decision against the
religious use of peyote (a prohibited hallucinogenic), wrote: “[W]e have never
held that an individual’s beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise
valid law prohibiting conduct that the state is free to regulate” (Employment
Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 [1990], 878–879; emphasis added).
15. We borrow the phrase “institutional differentiation” from Sommerville (1992: 5).
16. This same comment could also be made concerning the recent best-selling
English publications that adopt an atheistic stance in the study of religion (e.g.,
books by such authors as Richard Dawkins [2006], Daniel Dennett [2006], Sam
Harris [2004, 2006], and Hitchens [2007]). Failing to see “religion” as nothing
but a name representative of a bundle of relations that sets apart certain social
practices, such authors mistake it for a substantive item in the real world that
is to be contested on logical or evidentiary grounds. This move ensures that,
despite their protestations, they are as much members of the discourse on reli-
gion as those whom they criticize.
17. Sullivan signifies this difference by using the lowercase—protestant and cath-
olic—to name “a set of political ideas and cultural practices that emerged in
early modern Europe and after the Reformation,” as opposed to the uppercase
version of each term to refer to the more “narrow churchy sense” (2005: 8).
Although this distinction may appear handy, from the point of view of our argu-
ment, these two versions of the terminology are distinguishable inasmuch as the
lowercase constitutes the analytic level of classification while the uppercase is the
phenomenological. That is to say, if, instead of occupying its own unique (i.e.,
sui generis) domain, religion is simply a name given to certain social practices,
then a term that identifies the “political ideas and cultural practices” needs no
supplement (i.e., naming a supposed religious dimension).
18. Bowen (2007: 43–48) offers a compelling example of how local French govern-
ment worked with the concepts of private and public to allow so-called religious
Notes 203
(i.e., Muslim) symbolism in seemingly public cemeteries (where such symbol-

ism is apparently outlawed). Whether this solution to the issue of competing
social interests and identities is pleasing to all is, of course, not the point of
interest for the scholar of classification. Rather, the artful use of categories and
definitions that might otherwise strike users as static and stable is the topic of
interest.
19. Concerning the political role of using the study of religion to promote interreli-
gious dialogue and mutual understanding, see McCutcheon 2001b.
20. For a more detailed description of Smith’s work, see McCutcheon 2006.
c h a p t er 8
1. The irony is compounded when one notes Tertullian’s status as one of the
church’s first heresiologists, himself a heretic.
2. This is related to the eponymous irony described by Wiebe in The Irony of Theology
and the Nature of Religious Thought (1991).
3. Discussions of authorship and source criticism are especially well developed in
the field and to an extent far in advance of parallel investigations of either canon-
ical literature from other traditions or classical literature. The sheer volume of
work on the literary relationship among the three synoptic gospels is overwhelm-
ing, and the “synoptic problem” has come under investigation from a variety of
angles. See Longstaff (1988) for a bibliography on the synoptic problem in the
modern period extending only until 1988: The text occupies 235 pages. For a
particularly refined and distinctive approach to the literary relations among the
synoptists, see Kloppenborg 2007.
4. On, for example, the appropriation of critical methods from outside of theologi-
cal circles (such as postmodernism) to pursue theological ends, see Berlinerblau
2005: 135.
5. This is a quest that is itself ultimately also hermeneutical. On the hermeneutical
orientation of our field, see, among many others, the remarks of Burton Mack
(2001: 64).
6. Charles Darwin wrote to Henry Fawcett in 1861:
About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to
observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this
rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and
describe the colors. How odd it is that anyone should not see that observa-
tion must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service! (quoted
in Gould 1997: 148)
7. We are referring here to the historical study of the documents comprising the
New Testament (and related literature and data) and the events leading up to and
recounted in them. A somewhat different direction for the study of “the Bible” in
the context of religious studies would be inquiry into the development and usage
204 Notes
of the Bible as a cultural artifact, as suggested especially by Jonathan Z. Smith

(2009). A fascinating example of the exploration of the Bible as a contemporary
cultural artifact is provided by Brian Malley (2004).
8. This strange circumstance is reflected perhaps most vividly in the fact that in
North America there is a distinct scholarly association, the Society of Biblical
Literature, devoted to bringing together biblical scholarship on both testaments
and from both theological and secular perspectives; and that there is a separate
association, the American Academy of Religion, devoted to the study of, one
presumes, every other type of “religious” data.
9. See especially the arguments of N. T. Wright (2001) and Larry Hurtado (2003),
in which the supposed discontinuity of the earliest Christian views about Jesus
from their cultural context indicate that they could only have come into being
because they were true (see Wright on the resurrection) or due to some powerful
“religious experience” (see Hurtado on devotion to Christ).
10. And not only encouraged, but practiced, albeit largely as a voice in the wilder-
ness. See, for example, J. Z. Smith 1982: 90–101; 2004c: 340–361; and, especially,
1990.
11. This is a point that seems—unsurprisingly—to have been lost on the many crit-
ics of the comparison, who seem to think that comparing Jesus (or the rhetoric
of Q, etc.) to Cynics is essentially identical to claiming that Jesus was a Cynic, or
was self-consciously influenced by Cynics, or some such thing. See, for example,
Betz 1994; Eddy 1996.
12. Especially useful is the work of Marshall Sahlins (1987) and, more recently,
Maurice Bloch (e.g., 2005). Sahlins is made use of for particular exegetical ends
by, for example, Kirk 2003; Sahlins is drawn upon for theoretical ends especially
by the New Testament scholars associated with Cameron and Miller 2004.
13. One thinks primarily of current and recent doctoral candidates in religious
studies at Brown University, especially those under the supervision of Stanley
Stowers.
14. As carefully stated by Craig Martin (2009: 171), “[t]here is nothing intrinsically
objectionable to using a second-order conceptual scheme to describe things in
a historical context that did not use the same conceptual scheme. However, it
is necessary to add, we must beware of generalizations and chains of associa-
tions.” See also Bloch 2008: 2055 (emphasis added): “[A]nthropologists have,
after countless fruitless attempts, found it impossible to usefully and convinc-
ingly cross-culturally isolate or define a distinct phenomenon that can analytically
be labeled ‘religion.’” The concept, rather, is a modern western folk category,
describing—and falsely universalizing—a very particular social arrangement
specific to a particular culture and historical epoch. Compare also Day 2010:
6 (emphasis original): “ . . . a science of religion demands that one sever ‘religion’
from its all-too-human history (read ‘modern, European, and colonial’) and
insist that religion—as a relatively discrete thing in the world that people ‘do’ or
Notes 205
‘have’—really exists.” Or again, Dubuisson 2003: 115: “ . . . the human sciences

(and among them the history of religions) have frequently been content, often
unknowingly, sometimes naively, at other times arrogantly, consciously to revive
a prejudice—and one of our dearest native categories.” He (2003: 6) is even more
emphatic when he asks (rhetorically) “ . . . captive to its origins and history, has it
[religion] instead remained a kind of native concept, typically European, gather-
ing and summarizing under its aegis the struggles of a Western consciousness
grappling with itself?” For all its harshness, the characterization is fundamen-
tally accurate. Note, however, the resurgence of claims, drawing from Melford
Spiro (1966) that dealings with “superhuman” forces have always been a distinct
category of human behavior (see especially Riesebrodt 2010 and Stowers 2008).
For more extensive discussion of these issues, see chapter 6.
15. Moreover, the idea of religion imposes a conceptual framework developed in
the West onto cultures that did not share this framework. This latter objection,
however, strikes one as less salient: After all, we are essentially Westerners
trying to make sense of the world around us, and we will of course do so by
imposing our conceptual frameworks on things. Their failure to accord with the
self-understandings of those they describe should not prevent their use: We are
after all seeking our own understanding. On this issue, see the rather unedify-
ing exchange between Timothy Fitzgerald and Bruce Lincoln (Fitzgerald 2006
and Lincoln 2007). However, as argued by Dubuisson (2003: 114–115), there is an
additional, rather insidious dimension to the false universalization of a distinc-
tively Western phenomenon. Since the circumstances that generated religion
as a distinct social field are, he claims, particular to the West, “religion” will
have its clearest and most distinct forms in the West, even when projected onto
non-Western contexts. Thus will the West turn out to embody most perfectly this
supposed, shared dimension of human existence.
16. Initially, the pattern seems to have been an emerging nonecclesiastical state
power coming to lay claim to and dominate church structures and, subsequently,
an ideological claim to the effect that those structures were distinct from the
state, albeit still existing essentially at the sufferance of the state. On the para-
doxes of this last point, see especially Sullivan 2005.
17. This case is made in chapter 7, in this instance directed particularly against those
religionists who seem to be somewhat uncritically celebrating “postsecularism,”
as if the (arguable) tendency of modern nation-states to increasingly embrace
“religion” was not in fact tending to eliminate religion as a functioning social
category.
18. This is rather a role proper to the church and the pursuit of personal interests.
This is a point emphasized in chapter 3.
19. This is also why colonial situations seem to be especially marked by religion-like
phenomena, as is particularly emphasized by Timothy Fitzgerald (2007c) and
Tomoko Masuzawa (2005).
206 Notes
20. An excellent discussion of one such category in zoology is provided by Stephen

Jay Gould (1983: 355–365). Technically, polyphyly refers to a group that does not
include its own most recent common ancestor, hence the example of zebras,
which are species whose most recent common ancestor was, apparently, an
un-striped horse-like animal.
21. One can, of course, define “religion” more or less by fiat and in ways more rigor-
ous than in present colloquial use. See J. Z. Smith 1998: 281. In so doing, how-
ever, one will not only produce an entity that is actually quite different from what
is normally meant by “religion,” but also something that does not correspond
to the kinds of topics, traditions, and regions of expertise normally practiced in
departments of religious studies. There would be nothing wrong with such a
development, but whatever we would now be studying, it would not be, precisely,
religion.
22. Thus, for example, Richard Horsley, in spite of being strongly influenced by the
Marxist tradition, still focuses his analysis on early Christian and Jewish texts’
messages, interpreted of course in terms of a matrix of class struggle. Meaning
remains front and center, because the texts are, after all, religious.
23. By way of example, the most prominent current debate in Pauline studies revolves
around Paul’s beliefs about the Jewish Torah: The so-called “new perspective,”
which essentially asserts that Paul is positive about Torah and continues to view
Israel as God’s chosen people, stands opposed to the “standard view,” in which
Paul is read as definitively rejecting the value and applicability of Torah. For dis-
cussion, see (among many others) Zetterholm 2009.
24. The verb pisteuo, to believe, to trust, occurs about 248 times in the New Testament;
the nominal form pistis another 244 times; and the adjective pistos an additional
66 times.
25. Distinguishing personal religion, his own subject of interest, from institutional
religion, William James (1958: 41) defines the former as “the inner dispositions
of man himself . . . his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incomplete-
ness. . . . The relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between
man and his maker.” Or again, Eliade’s Myth of Eternal Return focuses on “con-
ceptions of being and reality that can be read from the behavior of the man of
the premodern societies” (Eliade 1954: 3). Cantwell Smith, of course, famously
distinguishes the external human expressions of “religion” from the internali-
ties of its causal “faith” (Smith 1962). Indeed, the basic notion that the core or
essence of religion is found in an interior state that is subsequently instantiated
and culturalized in contingent external expressions seems to be the driving prin-
ciple behind the phenomenological study of religion.
26. For example, the focus on free-floating beliefs also contributes to the perpetual
efforts to define an ideology called “gnosticism,” the content of which is the cause
of its conflicts with “orthodox” Christianity. Even some of the better treatments
of ancient Christianity as a diverse and only gradually institutionalizing entity
Notes 207
still treat the conflict with gnosticism as an ideological one, rather than as, say, an
exercise in developing disciplinary structures within the church, or as conflicts
between authority figures with different social constituencies. The situation is
gradually improving, however, as scholars are setting aside the category of gnos-
ticism itself and focusing more on individual schools, local power dynamics, and
the like. See Williams (1996) and King (2003).
27. On this point, see Stowers 2009: 2; and especially Arnal and Braun 2004: 464
(thesis number 7): “Similarity of ideas, even when this similarity is the result of
dispersal by some mechanism of transmission, is not automatically convertible
to similarity or identity of motive force.”
28. This approach is taken by DeConick (2005), who argues that an originally apoca-
lyptic text (the first edition of Thomas) was later edited in light of the “cognitive
dissonance” caused by the “delay of the parousia.”
29. This is certainly true of the better work on apocalypticism. Some scholarship
seems to almost assume that first-century Jews mysteriously had apocalypticism
in their blood, or that such beliefs were a more or less logical outgrowth of older
religious convictions. But excellent work has been done for decades on the social
matrix of apocalypticism, with scholars such as Richard Horlsey placing spe-
cial emphasis on Roman imperial depredations as a causal factor in popular
revolts, messianic movements, and the like. See especially Horsley 1987. The
more refined one’s social analysis of the apocalyptic texts, however, the more
obvious it becomes that the material is the product of a learned, elite movement.
See Horsley 2010.
30. This point has been called into question in recent years. See especially Becker
and Reed 2007; and Boyarin 2004. For a rejoinder, see, among others, Robinson
2009.
31. There is something of a paradox here: “Religion” gives the warrant to this lop-
sided focus on decontextualized belief (since, as argued above, the study of
religion is in essence the study of decontextualized belief). At the same time,
situating New Testament scholarship within the broader study of religion can
help to correct such reasoning, if only by demonstrating its inapplicability or
distastefulness outside of the Christian (and Jewish) tradition. This latter is only
true, however, if the study of religion is conceived of as something quite different
from the multicultural celebration of diversity and the promotion of appreciation
by learned insiders that it often is today.
32. See also the discussion of anthropological difficulties with “belief” in Bloch
2005: 107, citing Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and others.
33. See also Long 1993: 180–211. Perhaps we are treating yet another social fiction—a
“text”—as a kind of real entity and trying to discern its “mind,” making exegesis
rather like the inspection of chicken entrails to determine the will of the gods.
34. See Snyder 2003. Specifically, Snyder argues, the imagery and practices around
Christian burials show a much stronger interest in the motifs of peace and
208 Notes
continuity with the dead than in resurrection. The much more unusual and dis-
tinctive conceptions that appear in the written record may reflect an effort to
establish a distinctive identity, rather than serving as an accurate statement of
what the majority of ancient Christians actually believed.
35. See especially Stowers 2008, 2009. Stowers’s discussion of this issue takes the
theoretical bull by the horns: He addresses and dismisses rational-choice indi-
vidualism as hopelessly ideological and social holism (e.g., à la Durkheim) as
nonempirical. See Stowers 2008: 438.
36. See Stowers 2008: 440. This same claim about belief being secondary to prac-
tices (or institutions) is made in different ways by Pascal and Louis Althusser, for
whom belief follows from the pretense of belief. The point is summarized nicely
by Žižek 1994: 12–13 (emphasis original):
Religious belief, for example, is not merely or even primarily an inner con-
viction, but the Church as an institution and its rituals (prayer, baptism,
confirmation, confession . . . ) which, far from being a mere secondary exter-
nalization of the inner belief, stand for the very mechanisms that generate it.
When Althusser repeats, after Pascal: “Act as if you believe, pray, kneel
down, and you shall believe, faith will arrive by itself,” he delineates an
intricate reflective mechanism of retroactive “autopoetic” foundation that
far exceeds the reductionist assertion of the dependence of inner belief on
external behavior. That is to say, the implicit logic of his argument is: kneel
down and you shall believe that you knelt down because of your belief—
that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief;
in short, the “external” ritual performatively generates its own ideological
foundation.
37. One might cite any sort of intellectual or disciplinary jargon as an example, but
slang can serve the same function. On the issue of “anti-language,” see Halliday
1976; Montgomery 1986: 94–98.
38. This effect is not ubiquitous, however, hence our ambivalence. A wonderful
example of the right kinds of associations being made as a result of applying
the idea of “religion” to the New Testament canon is to be found in the work
of Jonathan Z. Smith (2009). The extreme degree of self-consciousness that
Smith brings to his application of religion-inspired taxa is not shared by most
in the field, and so leaves people who pursue Smith’s approach vulnerable to
the kinds of mistakes that Smith himself is careful not to make. Others who
have made productive use of the category “religion” to make sense of ancient
Christian materials include Karen King (2006), Burton Mack (2008), Rodney
Stark (1996), and Stan Stowers (2009).
39. A wonderful example of the way this can work in the study of ancient Christianity
involves translation: Terms in the New Testament with perfectly ordinary points
of reference, such as ekklēsia (citizen assembly), pistis (trust, trustworthiness),
and pneuma (wind, breath) are typically rendered as distinctively religious terms
Notes 209
with no obvious nonreligious point of reference (church, faith, and spirit). The
effect is completely mystifying.
40. The best and most influential example in the case of the Pauline letters is Stowers
1994; for the gospels, see, among several examples, Mack and Robbins 1989 in
general, and, on the Gospel of Luke, Braun 1995.
41. The bibliography on voluntary associations is quite extensive. A good if now
somewhat dated collection of essays can be found in Kloppenborg and Wilson
1996.
42. See especially Romans 11:17–18; Galatians 4:5–7. For discussion, see especially
Hodge 2007; and see the remarks in Arnal 2008.
43. In saying this, we are thinking especially of the brilliant discussion by Stan
Stowers (2009), in which he clearly recognizes that “religion” is not a simple or
unified entity, and thus attempts to break it down into various forms (predicated
on various social roles): household religion, scribal religion, priestly religion, etc.
The important recognition is that religion as a category functions more like a
genus or family than a species. We argue, in contrast, that religion, being para-
phyletic, actually straddles several genuses or families. But both positions insist
that religion is not a simple or singular entity. In a similar vein, but with different
implications, see Atran 2002.
44. Indeed, in some cases, theories of religion set the task for themselves of explain-
ing precisely this phenomenon: How and why is it that people make up these
strange entities? This is the problematic addressed especially by David Hume, E.
B. Tylor, and, more recently, Daniel Dennett (2006), among others.
45. See Tylor 1871: 383, emphasis added; compare Spiro (1966: 24). Interestingly,
Daniel Dennett (2006) appears to have reinvented the wheel on this point,
explaining religion in terms of what is essentially animism, but failing to
cite Tylor.
46. See, for instance, Spiro’s characterization of a religious system as “consist[ing]
of a set of explicit and implicit propositions concerning the superhuman world
and of man’s relationship to it, which it claims to be true” (Spiro 1966: 101). The
striking advance in the work of Sperber and Boyer is that they raise the ques-
tion of just how true religious propositions are supposed to be for those who
hold them.
47. It cannot be, in fact, because such a definition would fail to explain the difference
between an incorrect scientific hypothesis and a religious claim.
48. This minimally counterintuitive dimension of religious entities is particularly
important: The limits placed on the counterintuitive qualities of religious claims
tend to confirm the common features of human cognition. See Bloch 2005: 104:
“these counter-intuitive propositions are only counter-intuitive in very limited
ways and so easily remain overwhelmingly within types of knowledge bounded
and formed by human-wide, genetically inscribed predispositions which make
us all see the world in a particular way.”
210 Notes
49. There is of course a rejoinder here: The work of Sperber and Boyer is predicated
on the conviction that human cognition is a biologically constrained process and
that therefore human beings, cross-culturally, apprehend the world in very simi-
lar ways; thus what is a counterintuitive feature of existence for one person will
necessarily be a counterintuitive feature of existence for any other. One of the
difficulties with this position revolves around the vast importance of ordinary
experience in our responses to the world.
50. Among other things, this makes counterintuitiveness a practice, rather than a
belief. It also has the advantage of focusing on a given culture’s own attitudes,
rather than assigning practices to categories based essentially on an outsider’s
judgment (no matter how commonsense or “intuitive”) as to how realistic they
are. Compare also the fascinating discussion by Marshall Sahlins (1987: 145–147)
on how the idea of a “god” gets sliced up differently in traditional Hawaiian ver-
sus European cultures.
51. Not only are the qualities of this imaginary entity not objectively present in the
attributes or character of the person who fills this social role; in addition, the
office circulates from one person to another, whatever their differences or per-
sonal characteristics.
52. We might also place in this category non-natural time divisions: hours,
(non-lunar) months, etc.
53. Compare also Sahlins (1987: 147):
The culture categories by which experience is constituted do not follow
directly from the world, but from their differential relations within a sym-
bolic scheme. . . . There is no necessary starting point for any such cul-
tural scheme in “reality,” as Stuart Hampshire writes, while noting that
some philosophers have believed there is. Rather, the particular culture
scheme constitutes the possibilities of worldly reference for the people of a
given society, even as this scheme is constituted on principled distinctions
between signs which, in relation to objects, are never the only possible
distinctions.
54. I owe this observation to Kenneth MacKendrick of the University of Manitoba.
55. What better, fantastic projection of global consumer capitalism could be imag-
ined? Santa is the very totem of “the Market.”
56. The male identity of all of these characters is not intentional, but it is probably
revealing nonetheless. If such characters represent working conceptual models
of social bodies, practices, and roles, then the greater social resonance of male
characters is a direct function of the dominance of males in the cultures in ques-
tion. There are corresponding female characters (Mrs. Claus, Lieutenant Uhura,
Hermione), but they lack the centrality and catchiness of the male figures.
57. In what follows, therefore, we play rather fast and loose with the term “coun-
terintuitive” itself, which we do not treat in the very technical sense used by
Boyer and Sperber, as a claim that runs counter to the cognitive hardwiring of
Notes 211
the brain; rather, the term is applied to events that are somehow discursively
highlighted as dubious, questionable, extraordinary, and unexpected. This is a
nontechnical use of the term, but we continue to use it in this fashion because
of the way it brings together Boyer’s and Sperber’s quite valid and useful claims
with a wider range of data and types of phenomena than concerned them.
58. Atran (2002: 5–6 and elsewhere) marks the expensive nature of religious practices
and beliefs as an important definitional hallmark. This is a tempting approach,
but it should be noted that the production of fantasy has enormous resources
devoted to it in our own time and culture, without thereby becoming any less
fictitious, hence the insistence here on seriousness, rather than expense, as the
important variable.
59. For the example of (paper or fiat) currency—which is a classic minimally coun-
terintuitive entity, insofar as it is an intrinsically valueless object to which is
imputed the imaginary and nonempirical characteristic of fixed value—we are
indebted to Craig Martin.
60. Again, this playfulness is itself an external imposition, something determined
about the texts, stories, and characters in question, rather than by their intrinsic
content.
61. It will of course be noted that in many cultures, storytelling, even of the fictitious
variety, is treated with a higher degree of seriousness than it is in our own. But
it is precisely at this point that the materials in question begin to shade over
into what we would describe as “religious.” Again, the point is not that there
is anything intrinsic to storytelling that makes it obviously fictitious, but that
storytelling may be approached or presented at a variety of different levels of
seriousness.
62. It must again be stressed: Which entities get assigned to this category will vary
from culture to culture, or even, as noted below, over time or among different
subgroups within a culture. This is the burden of Bloch’s example of the sampy
versus the ancestors among the Malagasy: For us, both entities are “religious”;
for the Malagasy, however, the ancestors are (normally) real entities who are in
no way marked as ambivalent, questionable, or counterintuitive.
63. The point is similar to the one made by Freud in Totem and Taboo, that a taboo in
itself indicates ambivalence, insofar as there is no point in forbidding an action
that no one wishes to do, and so prohibition is a signal and symptom of desire.
So, we are arguing, is affirmation a symptom of doubt.
64. Apparently, Tertullian did not write any such thing; the quotation rather inac-
curately reflects his reasoning in De Carne Christi V, 4.
65. So also with Greek religion: The continual insistence on the deities as “listening”
is an implicitly agonistic expression of conviction in their efficacy.
66. Compare Gould 1997: 39:
This deeply (perhaps innately) ingrained habit of thought causes us par-
ticular trouble when we need to analyze the many continua that form
212 Notes
so conspicuous a part of our surrounding world. Continua are rarely so

smooth and gradual in their flux that we cannot specify certain points
or episodes as decidedly more interesting, or more tumultuous in their
rates of change, than the vast majority of moments along the sequence.
We therefore falsely choose these crucial episodes as boundaries for fixed
categories, and we veil nature’s continuity in the wrappings of our mental
habits.
67. See the various essays in Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983); especially Hobsbawm
(1983) and Trevor-Roper (1983).
68. In chapter 3, we argue that something similar occurs in the creation of a kind of
“sacred space” at Disney World, in which the realities of the fictitious entities of
the Disney universe are acted out and take on a greater degree of reality than in
the “normal” world, while at the same time protecting that normal world from
“infection” by these realities by carefully segregating Disney World from the sur-
rounding environment. Another example, of questionable seriousness, is the
development of an explicitly religious movement and set of institutions based on
the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski.
69. That is, this middle ground represents a kind of logical possibility between
imaginative products construed as sheer fiction and those that are treated as
wholly reified social facts. It is thus something that will simply arise because
of the human phenomenon of differential treatment of imaginative products,
and need have no special role, just as people of middle height have no special
social function; they are just those who fall between short people and tall people.
Nonetheless, we will try to show that these interstitial entities are attractive, and
hence that people return to them again and again precisely because they are use-
ful in a variety of ways. The argument, then, is not that such beings or such a
kind of discourse is theoretically mandatory, but that it can be used, and often is
used, to a variety of ends, to which it is exceptionally well suited.
70. The importance of the extent to which a discursive realm is speculative or not
for its classification as “religious” or not is evident in the willingness of some
conservative Christians to actively deny, on essentially “religious” grounds, the
theory of evolution, largely on the basis of misconstruing its designation as a
“theory” as evidence of its speculative—and therefore religiously debatable—
character. Few Christians, no matter how conservative, deny electricity or gravity,
because their facticity can be easily demonstrated. But they are equally unlikely
today to deny the heliocentric character of the solar system (though this was once
a contentious issue), because even though this fact of the world is not immedi-
ately and physically evident, it has become so embedded within ordinary quotid-
ian discourse as to assume a degree of apparent facticity that evolution seems
(for some) to lack.
71. On the fuzziness of “societies” and “cultures,” see especially Sahlins 1987. We
are indebted to the observations of Stan Stowers (2008) for clarifying the ways
Notes 213
in which “society” refers to a nonentity, to something that is not a thing in itself,

and is therefore a reifying metaphor, although it is unclear how far Stowers
would take these observations. Compare also and especially Bayart 2005.
72. Building is an especially resonant metaphor behind the Marxian discussion of
base and superstructure.
73. This is a point made by Lévi-Strauss in his insistence that animals and animal
bodies are excellent metaphoric vehicles for thinking about systems.
74. Efforts to describe this mysterious agency have led some sociologists to a reifica-
tion of society itself, but this is nothing new; they are simply using more abstract
terms to capture what the pensée sauvage described in overtly and self-consciously
metaphoric language. Durkheim treats “society” as an entity, while Marx locates
the agentive force of society in either classes or dialectic, or both.
75. The similarity of talking animals to deities was drawn to our attention by Darlene
Juschka.
76. This observation fits well with the recognition that human language is not origi-
nally or essentially a system of communication or of passive transmission of
worldly “facts,” but is rather a modeling system, a human invention imposed
upon reality to shape it. See Juschka 2009: 181; Mitchell 1986.
77. Compare Levine 1988: 42:
The benefits of the inherently ambiguous character of legal rules are two-
fold. The ambiguity of the categories used in the legal process permits the
infusion of new ideas, and thus enables societal regulations to adapt to an
inexorably changing environment. And it permits the engagement of par-
ties who submit contending interpretations of legal notions to participate,
through the open forum of the court, in the continuous reestablishment
of a rule of law that stands as their common property and their warrant of
real community.
78. The more invisible and less concrete are the metaphors for a given social body,
the more inquiry can be directed at them, the more “wiggle room” there is;
hence efforts to deify rulers and thereby make the social metaphor correspond
to an actual empirical entity (really, any personality or ruler cult) are intrinsically
authoritarian.
79. Compare Cusset 2008: xx–xxi, emphasis original: “Where interpretation is obvi-
ous, where it is not a question, power reigns supreme; where it is wavering,
flickering, opening its uncertainty to unpredictable uses, empowerment of the
powerless may be finally possible.”
80. It is possible that there is a double meaning intended in this article by “defer-
ence,” rather akin to Derrida’s pun on differance: In the ritual situation, one defers
to an authority one need not understand; at the same time, in many rituals, the
origin (and meaning) of the tradition itself is endlessly deferred to the past.
81. See Bloch 2005: 131, emphasis original: “[A]lthough we normally think of tra-
dition as something being handed forward from the past to the present, the
214 Notes
appeal to the authority of tradition, something that is socially much more cen-
tral, involves being handed back from the present toward an indeterminable past
destination.”
82. As Bloch argues (2005: 127):
Situations when the truth of certain propositions is to be accepted through
deference, and therefore not necessarily understood, are socially and cul-
turally organized and regulated. Living in a partially institutionalized form
of life, which is what is meant by living in society, means that there are
moments, concepts and contexts the why and wherefores of which one may
examine and moments, concepts and contexts where this is inappropriate.
83. See, for example, Q 12:24. At issue is ordinary human behavior, and God is used
in such a way that his counterintuitiveness is not only not stressed, it is denied.
84. The role of various spirits, and of spirit itself, deserves extended consideration,
which, alas, it cannot be given here. The role of spirit in antiquity was often con-
ceptualized as something of a natural force or fluid, and so not intended to be a
nonempirical or counterintuitive object. Yet individual spirits of various sorts are
invested with counterintuitive properties.
85. Again, lest this seem obvious, note that Jesus appears in other texts as a much
less counterintuitive being, for example, in the Talmuds as the bastard child of a
loose woman and a deceiver of Israel. Thus there is a choice involved in casting
Jesus this way. One might define the Jesus movements (and what later became
Christianity) as simply those groups that chose to cast or emphasize the charac-
ter of Jesus as a counterintuitive entity. After all, in terms of theological or ideo-
logical content, there is hardly anything that clearly separates the first Christians
from their Jewish and Gentile contemporaries: Little is new, besides the charac-
ter and the story associated with him.
86. This is a feature they share in common; see especially Paul’s perennial identifica-
tion of Jesus with the “Christ” and his comments on Jesus Christ in Philippians
2:5–11.
87. See LSJ, s.v. anastasis. We owe this observation to Willi Braun (personal
communication).
88. The reconstruction and translation (with some modification) are from Robinson
et al. 2002: 119.
89. This is not surprising in general, actually. Any moment of social transforma-
tion generates feelings of alienation and strangeness. The motif of the alien, the
stranger, has therefore recurred frequently in literature in varying ways and often
in texts that have become hugely influential. Camus’ L’étranger, for example, a
monument in 20th-century fiction, is almost an anti-gospel.
90. As well as, of course, the inversionary payoff at the end of the story: What was
once devalued in exile comes to be honored in the heavenly homeland.
91. We owe the King Arthur analogy to John Parrish (personal communication).
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Index
Africa, 121 Bayart, Jean-François, 123

African religions, 48, 95, 121–123, Beard, Mary, 147, 148
127 Becker, Gay, 207n. 30
Alabama, University of 40, 91, 121, belief, 5, 19–21, 39–40, 45, 121, 124,
194n. 24 143–154
Allah, 157 critic of, 39
Althusser, Louis, 208n. 36 as human doings, 54–56, 64, 79,
American Academy of Religion (AAR), 97, 106
10, 45, 57–58, 84, 86, 180n. 15, study of, 76
181n. 20, 193n. 22 see also imaginative entities
anthropology, 6, 7, 34, 105, 106, 132, 135, Bell, Catherine, 38, 191n. 15
136, 176n. 1, 180n. 14 behavior, 5, 34, 40, 49, 54, 58–62, 99,
apocalypticism, 144 100, 124–125, 149, 162
Asad, Talal, 12, 28–30, 59, 106, 109, 118, see also human
140 Benavides, Gustavo, 38
Ascough, Richard, 150 Benedict 16th, ix–xi, 175n. 1, 199n. 13
authentic 54, 116, 121, 132 Bernstein, Carl, 77
inauthentic, 116, 127 binary pairs, 8, 10, 119, 127, 128
authenticity, 116–119 Bloch, Maurice, 30, 105, 110, 113,
authority, 28, 84, 136 153–156, 158, 161, 178n.10, 198n.7,
204n. 14, 207n. 32, 209n. 48,
Bainbridge, William, 40 211n. 62, 214n. 82.
Bakker, Jim, 46 Bourdieu, Pierre, 147
Balangangadhara, S.N., 9 Bowen, John, 132, 200n. 6,
Barrett, David, 51 202n. 18
Barrett, Justin, 92 Boyer, Pascal, 92, 95, 152–157, 210n. 49,
Baudrilland, Jean, 63, 65, 183n. 13, 210n. 57
185n. 14, 186n. 23, 187n. 25 Boyarin, Daniel, 107, 109
234 Index
Braun, Willi, xv, 31, 118, 169, 207n. 27 colonial, xiv, 13, 98, 112, 107, 123, 124,
Bronte, Emily, 24, see also Wuthering 125, 140
Heights colonialism, xii, xiv, 50, 107–108, 111–112
Buddhism, 41 see also post-colonial
Bultmann, Rudolf, 144 commodity, 65, 68, 69
Bush, George W. (U.S. President), 1, 7, comparison, 74, 120, 138
84, 114–115 and historical studies, 13
religion, 52, 83
Cameron, Ron, 204n. 12 parity, 137
Camus, Albert, 214n. 89 consumerism, 15, 65, 68
capital, 65, 67, 69, counterintuitive, 92, 152–160, 162
symbolic or cultural, 69, 149 counterintuitive entities, 162,
capitalism, 58, 62, 65–67, 70, 140 165–168; see also Jesus
Catholicism, as a mass social Courtright, Paul, 9
movement, 130 cross-cultural, x, xii, 3, 6, 9, 11, 22, 41,
Certeau, Michel de, 146, 200n. 3 96, 119
church, 51, 60, 109, 125, 130, see also religion as a cross-cultural
131, 140 universal
as a cultural institution, 28, 60 cross-disciplinarity, 43–45, 97
state separation, 133, 120 cultural immersion, 6
Christianity, 11, 21, 51–52, 109, 139, 143, cultural symbolism, 26
145, 147, 154, 157, 171–172 culture, 9, 49, 53, 54, 57, 88, 93, 97, 105,
origins of, 135, 137–138, 144, 151–168, 111, 112, 134, 156, 158, 176n. 1
169, 208n. 39 popular culture, 57, 58, 70
Christians, 10, 137, 143, 150, 152
Cicero, 109 Danforth Foundation, 77, 86, 88–90,
citizen, 98, 119, 128 194n. 24, 194n. 25, 194n.26,
see also nation-state 194 n. 28,
citizenship, 15, 65, 66, 67, 98, 109 Day, Matthew, 30, 141
see also religion Deep Throat, 77
classification, 1, 2, 12, 50, 51, 53, 93–95, definition, 12, 17, 22, 23, 29, 81
97–99, 105, 107, 115–116, 119, 120, culturalist, 21
122, 123, 125, 132 functionalist, 20, 23, 25
cognition; see human cognition intellectualist, 20
cognitive, 27, 54, 64, 93–94, 98, 152, of religion, 17–18, 21, 151, 176n. 1,
154, 157 177n. 5, 197n. 1
approaches to religion, 105 substantivist, 23, 25
theorists, 19, 45, 100 demarcation, 57, 125
psychology, 39 democracy, 77, 88
sciences, 91, 138 Dennett, Daniel, 146
Colbert, Stephen, 7 Derrida, Jacques, 186n. 18
Cold War, 72 ff. Depeche Mode, 40
Index 235
description, x, xiii, 6, 23, 39, 41, 47, 101, exegesis, 148

103, 113, 120, 125 explanation, 6, 9, 66, 105, 138, 144,
see also redescription 145, 162
discourse, xii, xiii–xiv, 10, 15, 28, experience
35, 38, 44–45, 52, 57, 61, 64, authentic, 9
65, 69, 76, 118, 119, 124, 127, Disney, 62
152–153, 162 human, 74, 104, 110
as instances of human data, 38 mana-like, 95
local, emic, folk, 41, 95 near-distant, 41
first-order, x religious, 39, 91, 94, 97, 98,
of Buddhist, 34 100, 145
of elite participants, 33, 35 unique, 22
of tolerance, 76
religious, 46, 70, 107, 152 fantasy, 63, 64, 70
theological, 34, 103, 107 family resemblance, 23, 94
Disney Fasolt, Constantin, 126–127, 201n. 7
communities, 61 Ferrell, Jeff, 100
Disney World, 59, 61–69 Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler, 43–44
see also religion first-order phenomenological
dogmatism, 48 categories, 35, 54
Doniger, Wendy, 9 Fitzgerald, Timothy, 30, 108, 111, 139
Douglas, Mary, 120, 126, 132, 133, folk categories/claims/ taxonomies,
200n. 5 concepts, xii, 2, 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 27,
Draper, Don, 55 53, 92, 95, 96, 97, 113, 120
Dubuisson, Daniel, 30, 106, 108, 111, 112, as cross-cultural universal, 53–54, 105,
139, 205n. 15 110, 112, 136, 169
Durkheim, Emile, x, 21–23, 118, 120, 125, as opposed to analytic categories
130, 159, 197n. 1, 213n. 74 119–120
classification, ix, 101
economy of identity, 132 definition, 12
economy of signification, 116 Ford, David, 34–35
Eisenhower, Dwight, 2, 88 Foucault, Michel, 15, 107, 115
Eliade, Mircea, xi, 7, 22, 32, 54, 143, Frazer, James G., 19–20
206n. 25 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 22, 25, 102
see also new humanism definition of religion, 18
emic/etic, 97 fundamentalism, 63
Encyclopedia of Religion, 32
Enlightment, 19, 20, 59, 111 Gabor, Dennis, 73–74
ethnocentric, 9, 106, 112 Gager, John, 138
ethnocentrism, 107 Geertz, Clifford, 12, 22–23, 47, 97,
ethnography, 6, 33 177n. 6
evolution, theory of, 212n. 70 definition of religion, 26–27
236 Index
generalization, 12, 104, 125, 141, 151 sciences, 75, 107, 135, 151
Gershwin, George and Ira, 122 spirit, 4, 85
globalization, 2, 65 humanism, see new humanism
God humanities, 27, 72, 73, 81, 84, 85, 86,
as concept, 43–44 88, 89
see also imaginative entities publicly funded, 76
governmentalité, 15, see also Foucault, Hume, David, 19
Michel Hurtado, Larry, 145
Gospel of Thomas, 148–149
Gray, Horace, 122 idealism, 38, 121, 142
Green, Garrett, 176n. 6 identity, ix, 11, 15, 50, 51, 64, 65, 69, 116,
Gregorian calendar, 50 119, 124, 132, 140, 149, 185n. 16
Griffiths, Paul, 35 ahistorical, 12
belief constituting, 146
Harland, Philip, 150 choice, 58
Harry Potter, 155 Christian, 150, 165
see also imaginative entities economy of, 132
Harvey, David, 63, 64, 67, 68, 186n. 21, Jesus, 166, 167, 168
186n. 22 modern, 15, 127
hegemony, 87, 96 political, 109
hermeneutical, 45, 54, 59, 135 politics of, 66
origins of the field, 143 rhetoric, 66
Herodotus, 119 shared, 10
Hiaasen, Carl, 61–62 social, 5, 65, 70, 99, 110, 119
Hinduism, 10 ideology, 22, 43, 54, 58, 143
Hinnells, John, 32, 34, 38, 46–49, 51, Ignatius of Antioch, 11
180n. 14, 181n. 21 imperialism, 9, 49, 54, 94, 108
historicization, 12, 13, 30, 172 imaginative entities, 155–165
History of Religions, 73, 106, 142 individualization, 58, 61
Hobsbawm, Eric, 158 intention, 39
Holbrook, Clyde, 74, 84, 85, 86, 90, interior disposition, 40, 98, 99
189n. 4, 189n. 5, 191n. 14, 192n. 20 see also experience
homily, x interpretation, 6, 70, 148, 149
see also pep talk Islam, 12, 13, 47, 132, 157
Horsley, Richard, 206n. 22
human, 135, 163 James, William, 3, 39, 121, 143, 160, 171,
behavior, 147, 163 206n. 25
condition, 86, 156 Jesus, 63, 138, 144–145, 148, 151, 162–163,
imagination, 162 165–170
nature, 3, 60, 110, 112, 141 see also imaginative entities
phenomenon, 29, 136, 138, 139, 149, Jesus stories, 167–170
156, 162, 169 Johnson, Mark, 159
Index 237
Journal of the American Academy of McCain, John, 1

Religion (JAAR), 86 McCumber, John, 77
Judaism, 51, 145 meaning, 4, 5, 10, 31, 39, 43, 55, 59, 80,
86, 92, 93, 122, 129, 148, 149
Kant, Immanuel, 182n. 3 Medaris, John B., 87
Kaufman, Gordon, 43–44 Meryl Streep, 14; see also “The Devil
Keane, Webb, 105, 139 Wears Prada”
Kent Fellowship Program, 86 metaphors, 149, 159
King, Richard, 111, 139 metaphysical, 21, 42, 120, 123, 177
Knodt, Eva, 55 metaphysics, 42, 52
Kripal, Jeff, 9 Mickey Mouse, 63; see also Jesus
Kuper, Hilda, 117 Miller, David, 72
Kvanvig, Jonathan, 42 modern, 106–140, 177n. 4
capitalism, 58, 62, 65, 140
Laclau, Ernesto, 128 European, 108
Laine, James, 9 individual, 15, 58
Language, 48, 55, 92, 93, 96, 99, inventions, 121, 140; see also belief
149, 169 political, 29, 59, 61, 108
Lakoff, George, 159 state, 28, 30, 61, 68,106, 108, 140
Lehrer, Jim, 1, 3, 15 modernism, 68
liberalism, 8, 59, 183n. 7 backlash against postmodernism
Lie, John, 119 modernity, 20, 29, 58–60, 66, 125, 129
Lincoln, Bruce, 46, 112, 116, 117, 130, More, Thomas, 129
180n. 18, 199n. 18 see also Lords Day
literary critic, 5 Müller, Friedrich Max, 19–20
Lopez, Donald, 39, 41, 55, 143, 146 Muslims, 11, 12
Lords Day, 129 myth, 4, 18, 72
see also More, Tyndale
Luce, Henry, 75 nation-state, 65, 98, 119, 124, 128
and tolerance discourse, 132
MacKendrick, Ken, 210n. 54 see also citizen
Mack, Burton, 138, 159 National Association of Bible
magic, 22, 61, 98, 125 Instructors (NABI), 86
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 6 National Defense Education Act
manifestation, 39, 54, 59, 70, 96, 104, 121 (NDEA), 78 ff., 191n. 17
Martin, Craig, 30, 141, 204n. 14 National Defense Fellowship (NDF),
Martin, Luther, 74–76, 164 78 ff.
Marx, Karl, 18, 22, 25, 60, 62, 102, 177n. 5 naturalism, 53
definition of religion, 18 naturalization, 93, 105
Marxism, 2 Neusner, Jacob, 189n. 7
Mary Magdalene, 21 new humanism, 54, 73
Masuzawa, Tomoko, 50, 107, 124, 139 see also Eliade, Mircea
238 Index
New Testament, 129, 135–139, postsecularism, 205n. 17

142–145, 148–149, 162, 169, Priestley, Miranda, 14
203n. 7 see also “The Devil Wears Prada”
Nix v. Hedden, 122–123 private/public, 132, 133
privatization, 58
Obama, Barack (U.S President), 1, 115 primitive, 6–7, 13, 16, 19
origins, 40, 52, 117, 169–170 Protestantism, as a mass social
vs beginnings, 56 movement, 130
Christian origins, study of 135–145, Prothero, Stephen, 50
151, 163 psychology, 28, 34, 39, 93
Otto, Rudolf, 22 see also cognitive
Paden, Williams, 38 Quinn, Philip, 31, 42

Paganism, 52–53
Parish, John, 138 Ramsey, Paul, 86
participants’ claims, 46 Raschke, Carl, 189n. 4
Penner, Hans, 44–45 rational, 149
pep talk, x rationalization, 27, 40, 108, 111
see also homily real vs. fantastic, 63
phenomenology redescription, 39, 40, 46, 138; see also
limits of, 103 description
philosophy, 25, 35, 80, 95, 111, 134 reductionism, 43, 46, 47
pilgrimage, 18, 33 religion
Platonic realm, 49 and citizenship, 15
Plutarch, 109 and science, 20
political as belief oriented, 28
artifacts, 39 as biological, 44
category, 60, 109, 140; see also as cultural tradition, 147
religion as category, xiv
context, 66 as concept, 48
definitions of religion, 61 as cross-cultural, trans-human
ideology 58 universal, 3, 27, 48, 95–96
modernity, 59, 64 as ever-changing objects in
postcolonial, 10, 127 motion, 7
theorists, 107 as a folk concept, 4, 108, 113, 120
postmodern as item of discourse, 97; see also
aesthetics, 64, 66–67 religious
discourse, 65 as local European category, 50
world, 69, 70 as political category, 60–61, 140
postmodernism, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, as sui generis, 27
186n. 22 as system of symbols, 23
postmodernity, 33, 59, 65, 67, 70 cognitive approach to, 27, 105
Index 239
definition of, 17–18, 21, 151, 176n. 1, scholars of religion, 3, 7, 15, 39, 46, 47,
177n. 5, 197n. 1 57, 80, 84, 87, 91, 132, 136, 197n. 13
in postmodern world, 69 scholars of social classification, 132
introduction to the study of, 31 Schrecker, Ellen W., 75
individualistic concept, 28–29 Scott, John Wallach, 179n. 10
religion/religions, 11, 46–52, 101, 107 secular/secularism, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17,
theories of, 25, 97, 102, 177n. 5, 26, 28, 29, 68, 70, 89, 106, 109,
209n. 44 110, 136, 140, 141, 200n. 6, 204n. 8
world religions, 50, 51, 107 as part of binary pair, 114 ff.
see also definition secularization thesis, 8, 73, 129
religious, xiii, 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, 19 new secularization thesis, 13
as an adjective, 13, 15, 196n. 10 Segal, Robert, 32–34, 44
as folk or phenomenological self-referential, 135–136
category, 120 Sharf, Robert, 39, 179n. 10
beliefs, 20, 21, 28, 45–46, 59, 143, 152 Sharpe, Eric, 33
experience, 39, 91, 94, 97, 98, signifiers, 92, 93, 99, 120, 128, 141,
100, 145 theologically local, 41
phenomena, 20, 21, 22, 30, 74, 102, simulation, 63–65, 68, 183n. 9, 184n. 13,
103, 137, 162 185 n. 14, 187 n. 23
practices, 26, 211n. 58 Smith, Jonathan Z., 5, 11 ,13, 15, 38–39,
symbols, 3, 26 46, 52, 53, 102, 103–106, 108, 113,
representation, 21, 58, 63, 64, 110, 138, 158 124, 131, 136–137, 138, 176n. 1
of experience, 64 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 12, 13,
Reynolds, Charles, 194n. 24 102–104
rhetoric, 2, 5, 66, 67, 75, 76, 78, 79, 87, Snyder, Graydon, 147
102, 143, 145, 150, 162, 172 Sobhuza II, 11, 117
Rice, Condoleeza, 115 social
Richard, Williams, 150 formation, 52, 128, 130, 141
ritual, 33, 34, 38, 40, 91, 161 science, 8, 27, 48, 81, 180
space, 158 theory, 116, 120
Rumsfeld, Donald, 114 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), 57,
Russell, Jeffrey Burton, 42 204n. 8
Ryba, Tom, 33 Society of Values in Higher Education
(SVHE), 86–87
sacred, x, 8, 21, 22, 23, 55, 56, 116, 118, Sperber, Dan, 152, 155–156, 157
119, 127, 128, 129, 131, 142, 159 spiritual, 3, 19, 24
Sahlins, Marshall, 204n. 12, 210n. 53 Spiro, Melford, 24, 151, 176n. 3
Said, Edward, 52, 107, 133 Spooner, Brian, 116
salience, 137, 139, 142, 157, 158 Spratt, Jack, 128
second-order analytic categories, 35, 54 Sputnik, 72, 73, 77–79, 86–90,
Schatzki, Theodore, 147 187n. 2
Schlatter, Richard, 84 Stark, Rodney, 39
240 Index
Stowers, Stanley, 102, 147 understanding (Verstehen), 54

definition of religion, 151 U.S. Declaration of Independence,
structure, 55, 76, 80, 127, 128, 132 182n. 3
structuralism, 122 U.S. Supreme Court, 83, 122, 125, 131,
Stuckrad, Kocku von, 32 202
study of religion, 17–19, 30–32, 44, 54, utopian, 60–62, 64
62–66, 80–81, 83–88, 116, 136,
138–139, 145 Vaage, Leif, 138
subjectivity, 70 Vietnam War, 115
Sullivan, Winnifred, 109, 202n. 17 Vries, Hent de, 8
supernatural, 24, 64
superstition, 3 Weber, Max, 17, 182n. 2
Wendt, Heidi, 148
Taylor, Mark C., 5, 32, 43, 45, 46, 47, Whitehouse, Harvey, 96–97
48, 55 Wiebe, Donald, 38, 74, 75
Taliaferro, Charles, 31, 42, 179n. 9 Williams, Raymond, 31
Taves, Ann, 91, 94 Wiredu, Kwasi, 48, 54
Tertullian, 134–135, 139, 157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 55, 127
dilemma, 135 Woodward, Bob, 77
“The Devil Wears Prada,” 14 western, 11, 27, 35, 73, 74, 104, 108, 110,
theologians, 5, 10, 11, 34, 44, 84, 96 112, 129, 140, 142
theology, 10–11, 17, 33–55, 42–43, 45, 48, scholars, 9, 107
88, 149, 150 Indologists, 10
theory, 40, 48, 64, 91–92, 97–98, non-western, 23, 103, 106, 112
100–101, 134, 141, 143 modernity, 28, 1142
anthropological, 138 history, 109
correspondence, 92, 96 see also modern
social, 120 world religions 50, 51, 107
of religion, 96, 97, 98, 138, 141 world
Tillich, Paul, 171 of human doings, 3, 4, 115, 149, 150, 172
tolerance; see discourse of tolerance modern, 10, 12, 15, 20, 51, 120
totemism, 21 see also Disney World
tradition, 38, 51, 52, 128, 141, 181n. 19, Wright, N.T., 145
213n. 81 Wuthering Heights, 24
transgression, 183
tribalism, 66 Yonan Edward A., 44, 45
truth, claims of, 136
Turner, Victor, 160 Zakheim, Dov, 114
Tylor, E. B., 19–20, 151 Zaman, Muhammad, 13
Tyndale, William, 129 Žižek, Slavoj, 29, 40

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Introduction: On the Persistence of Imagining Religion 1

1. On the Deﬁnition of Religion 17

2. Words, Words, Wordbooks, or Everything Old Is New Again 31

3. Contemporary Reinventions of Religion: Disney and the Academy 57

5. Will Your Cognitive Anchor Hold in the Storms of Culture? 91

6. Maps of Nothing in Particular: Religion as a Cross-cultural Taxon 102

7. “They Licked the Platter Clean”: On the Codependency of the

8. The Origins of Christianity Within, and Without, “Religion”:

address at the Eighth Annual Religion Graduate Student Symposium, Department

his linkage of these otherwise separable domains with an authoritative stamp—

so-called “American” car company might live in Japan—the debate’s organizers

status of cross-cultural universal tells us nothing new or interesting about the

secularism, though, of course, this is hardly the now-discredited secularization

realize that Western explanations of their religions and culture trivialize

throughout human history—they hardly used them as we do today. Just as a scholar

Although we hopefully have adopted a tone somewhat diﬀerent from Miranda

of interiority, autonomy, privacy, individual choice, authenticity, lived experience,

On the Definition of Religion

theorists of religion—Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud spring immediately to

it is the act of scholarship itself that . . . “invents” such categories as religion,

Some Major Scholarly Contributions

Functionalists prefer to deﬁne “religion” not in terms of what is believed

The classic functionalist deﬁnition of religion is that of Émile Durkheim,

1966). Geertz attempted to be as thorough and precise as possible, while provid-

Notwithstanding devastating and extended critique from several diﬀerent direc-

Table 1.1 Types of Definitions of Religion and their Characteristics

Characteristic Substantivist Deﬁnitions Culturalist Deﬁnitions

basis of deﬁnition ontological functionalist

point of religious refers to religious objects symbolic, communicative

content cross-culturally stable arbitrary, historically speciﬁc

referent extra-mundane mundane

value of religion good or bad often neutral

Geertz, while oﬀering essentially what we have called a culturalist deﬁnition

The symbols or symbol systems which induce and deﬁne dispositions we

Prospects: The Argument of this Book

In other words, our deﬁnitions of religion, especially insofar as they assume a

It may be a happy accident that this eﬀort of deﬁning religion converges

[T]he form of consciousness that ﬁts late-capitalist “post-ideological” soci-

this concerns only his or her privacy), disregards pathetic ideological

The point of these historical excursions is to suggest that the separation

Words, Words, Wordbooks, or

polonius: “What do you read, my lord?”

But, as any phenomenologist can tell you, appearances can be misleading.

Description Key Approaches Approaches

References Consolidated Bibliography

discourses—and thereby authorizing them inasmuch as traditions of participant

(himself a contributor to Continuum’s [“Rationality”] and Blackwell’s [“Economics

local theological and humanistic speculations written by and for “religionists”—as

discourses, because in both cases it nicely undermines naturalistic explanatory

[w]hen religion is explained in terms of nonreligious factors . . . the verac-

“[c]ritics of theology often embrace the methods of social sciences . . . with an

There may be no more succinct example of the widespread failure of historical

same equivocation in Hinnells’s own opening essay, “Why Study Religions?,” in

Although this dereference for so-called indigenous naming practices seems, at