Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism

ENCOUNTERING RELIGION

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

INSURRECTIONS:

CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors

The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.

After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins

The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures , Ananda Abeysekara

Nietzsche and Levinas: After the Death of a Certain God, edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo

Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe , Mary-Jane Rubenstein

Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation , Arvind Mandair

Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction , Catherine Malabou

Anatheism: Returning to God After God , Richard Kearney

Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation , Peter Sloterdijk

Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism , Clayton Crockett

Radical Democracy and Political Theology , Jeffrey W. Robbins

Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic , edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis

What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters , Udi Aloni

A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton , edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan

Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx , Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala

Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event , Clayton Crockett

Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience , Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou

The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts / L’Incident d’Antioche: Tragédie en trois actes , Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer

Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault , Peter Sloterdijk

To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections , Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe

ENCOUNTERING RELIGION

Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism

TYLER ROBERTS

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

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cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53549-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberts, Tyler T., 1960-

Encountering religion : responsibility and criticism after secularism / Tyler Roberts.

pages cm. — (Insurrections)

Includes bibliographical references (pages) and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14752-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53549-6 (electronic)

1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Social sciences. I. Title.

BL51.R576 2013

200.7—dc23

2012039916

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER PHOTO: © Getty Images

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Madeleine, Will, and Emma

We were to be freed from superstition; instead the frozen hopes and fears which attached themselves to rumored dictates of revelation have now attached themselves to the rumored dictates of experience…. Our education is sadly neglected: we have not learned in the moral life, as the scientists have in theirs, how to seek and press to the limits of experience; so we draw our limits well short of anything reason requires.

—STANLEY CAVELL, THE SENSES OF WALDEN

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I    LOCATING RELIGION

1    Religion and Incongruity

2    Placing Religion

PART II    ENCOUNTERING RELIGION

3    Encountering the Human

4    Encountering Theology

PART III    RELIGION, RESPONSIBILITY, AND CRITICISM

5    Religion and Responsibility

6    On Psychotheology

7    Criticism as Conduct of Gratitude

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making and it was only with the support of family and friends, colleagues and students, that I was able to see it to the end. I hope these few words of acknowledgment begin to convey the gratitude I feel for their care and generosity.

I thank first present and past members of the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College, including Tim Dobe, Caleb Elfenbein, Ed Gilday, Harold Kasimow, Henry Reitz, and Kathleen Skerrett. Much of what I write about here had its genesis in conversations with these colleagues about our curriculum and our research. I couldn’t have asked for a more congenial and stimulating setting in which to reflect on the current state of the field. In particular, I want to thank Ed Gilday, my partner in developing our course on method and theory, for the many long conversations we have had about the field, for his enthusiasm for my work, and for the critical acumen he brought to bear on the chapter drafts he read.

Speaking of congenial and stimulating settings, I want thank to Chuck Matthewes and Kurtis Schaeffer for organizing and leading a fantastic NEH Summer Seminar at the University of Virginia on The Study of Religion in the summer of 2011. Chuck and Kurtis assembled a group of scholars eager to test ideas with one another and gave us the space to go at it. For their contributions to the seminar, I thank Clayton Crockett, Greg Erickson, Jennifer Eply, Jennifer Gurley, Angie Heo, Joseph Laycock, Brenna Moore, Matt Mutter, Keven Schilbrack, Claudia Schippert, Rachel Scott, John Seitz, Kevin Vose, Chad Wellmon, and Liz Wilson. I extend special thanks to Matt, Brenna, and John for thoughtful comments on draft chapters; to Clayton, a longtime supporter of the project and an insightful reader of draft chapters; and to Kevin Schilbrack, with whom I have had many conversations on these topics over the years, for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. And I need to thank Chuck, once more, for his generous support of the project from beginning to end. As editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Chuck oversaw the publication of early versions of some of the material in the book. His enthusiasm at that point provided a much needed push. He also read the penultimate draft of what follows with the exemplary blend of encouragement and challenge that I know he has shown to many colleagues.

I have presented much of this material at conferences, at talks, and in essay form and I thank the colleagues who made these presentations possible. Some of my first published thoughts on secularism appeared in Secularisms, edited by Janet Jakobson and Ann Pelligrini, and I thank Ann for the invitation to contribute to the volume. Antoinette Denapoli organized an enjoyable visit to the University of Wyoming, where I presented material from the first two chapters. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba organized a conference for the Society for Theology and Continental Philosophy on Love’s Wisdom, where I first presented material from chapter 6 under the title Militant Love, and edited the volume that collected the conference papers, Transforming Philosophy of Religion. I presented the first version of chapter 7 at a panel on Stanley Cavell at a national meeting for the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. The other panelists, Rick Furtak, Ed Mooney, and Anthony Rudd, made this an exciting and valuable experience. I want to offer special thanks to Ed for our many conversations about Cavell, Kierkegaard, pedagogy, and life. His is the encouraging voice I hear in my head when I wonder whether this stuff really matters.

Many other colleagues have made their mark on the book. I thank Elizabeth Pritchard, Bud Ruf, and Alan Schrift for their comments on draft chapters. For good conversation and correspondence, I thank Heath Atchley, Jack Caputo, Hent de Vries, Peter Dula, Sam Gill, Philip Goodchild, Charles Hallisey, Tal Lewis, Lisa McCullough, Russell McCutcheon, Saba Mahmood, Johanna Meehan, Robert Orsi, J. Z. Smith, Jeff Robbins, and Mark Taylor. In one way or another, all helped me to develop and refine my thinking and writing.

The students at Grinnell College are some of the most engaged and challenging I have encountered and it has been a joy working with them. I’d like to extend special thanks, for their research and their interest, to Cain Elliott, Ben Lebsack, Tiffany Ong, Jacob Rhoades, Eric Ritter, Caitlin Short, Sam Stragand, Ian Warlick, and Adam Wert.

Angela Winburn has made Steiner Hall a great place to work. I thank her for that and for taking on the difficult job of organizing the mess of footnotes and bibliographical references I produced over the years. I also thank Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press for guiding the book through the review process with enthusiasm and expertise.

I am grateful for financial and leave support from Grinnell College and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In particular, I want to thank Dean Paula Smith and the Committee for Support of Faculty Scholarship at Grinnell for allowing me some flexibility in my sabbatical schedule so that I could make one more push to get this done.

Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to those who make it all worthwhile. Through many conversations—and arguments—about humanism and the humanities, Shuchi Kapila has made this a better book, but her companionship has done so much more. When I started the book, my children, Madeleine, Will, and Emma, were barely walking. How is it that the book has taken so long and they have grown up too fast? I dedicate the book to them.

Sections from chapter 1 appeared originally in: All Work and No Play: Chaos, Incongruity, and Difference in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 1 (2009): 81–104. Sections from chapter 2 appeared originally in: Rhetorics of Ideology and Criticism in the Study of Religion, Journal of Religion, July 2005. Sections from chapter 3 appeared originally in: Between the Lines: Exceeding Historicism in the Study of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 3 (September 2006): 697–719.

INTRODUCTION

Religion is about what is always slipping away.

—MARK TAYLOR¹

I have to begin with this

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams, shortly to become Archbishop of Canterbury, published a brief meditation on grief and mourning entitled Writing in the Dust. Williams had experienced the destruction and the dust firsthand, having been near the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He begins his reflections by invoking the last words of farewell from those on Flight 93, sent by cell phones to their loved ones. For Williams, these nonreligious words are testimony to what religious language is supposed to be about—the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.² From these secular words of others, Williams moves to grapple with his own words, the religious words he will use, as a Christian, to respond to these horrific events. The words do not come easily—they hang, hesitatingly, on the verge of silence and the void:

Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void. The more closely we bind God to our own purposes, use God to help ourselves avoid our own destructiveness, the more we fill up the void. It becomes very important to know how to use the language of belief; which is why the terrible simplicity of those last messages matters so intensely. And why also we have to tread so carefully in not making some sort of religious capital out of them. Ultimately, the importance of these secular words has to stand as a challenge to anything comfortingly religious we might be tempted to say. This is what human beings can find to say in the face of death, religion or no religion. This is what truly makes breathing space for others. Words like transcendent hang around uneasily in the background of my mind. Careful again. But that moment of pointless loving communication is the best glimpse many of us will have of what the rather solemn and pompous word means. I have to begin with this. I know I shall be feeling my way towards making some verbal shape out of it all in terms of my Christian faith. But there is nowhere else to start except with that frightening contrast: the murderously spiritual and the compassionately secular.³

Williams comes to his religious words slowly and only in the shadow of the murderously spiritual. And the words he does come to are words written in the dust, words that are written in the spirit of those sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks for festivals, made to be broken up.⁴ They are words not meant to draw attention and arrest us and accrue capital, but rather to slip away, releasing themselves, and us, into the midst of grief and so into the midst of life.

But words never do just what we want them to. Williams’s words are a gift, an offering to those in mourning. As such, they are caught in the bind of all human gift s. The gifts we receive seem always demand something of us. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, as Derrida puts it, to treat them as wholly gratuitous.⁵ Williams is aware of this, hence his desire to tread carefully. But all his care cannot prevent the fact that with his gift, in the form of the judgments and beliefs of a recognized religious authority, he will make religious capital out of his words. And by invoking Williams for my own purposes, I, too, will play my role in the circulation and accumulation of such capital. What kind of problem does this pose for Williams? For me?

Mark Taylor has written extensively about religion and capital, and his words about religion, quoted in the epigraph above, help us with these questions. Religion, he says, is about that which slips away, about the fact that as we pursue and try to articulate and grasp the things most important to us—whether meaning, value, identity, love, God—they elude us. I would add that they don’t slip away because we are not going after them correctly, but because it is in some sense in their nature to do so. Or to take this line of thought further—further perhaps than Taylor would go—there is a way in which meaning and value take place precisely in this elusiveness, in this slippage, thus existing only as a kind of excess in those things we can and do grasp.

We can observe, in Williams’s meditation, numerous kinds of slippage: between one’s own purposes and God’s, between the possibility and impossibility of giving gifts, between self-aggrandizement and self-effacement, between self and other, between the religious and the secular. What strikes me is the way his words, in both form and content, acknowledge and accept this slippage. Williams cites his concerns about capitalizing on the words and on the tragedies of others, yet he neither mourns nor defends the purity of his own intentions. Nor does his writing manipulate. Rather, it creates what he calls breathing space for the response of the reader, not so much to his words, but to the events of which he writes. Williams practices a kind of self-effacement in his writing that in the counsel to breathe, to take the time to allow the void its presence, absolves the reader of an expected, demanded response. To my mind, what makes Writing in the Dust powerful and exemplary of a basic Christian and—if we follow Taylor—religious gesture is that he does not try to halt, explain, or apply too much friction to this slippage. In this, I think, he helps enact Taylor’s claim that, since religion is about that which slips away, it is impossible to grasp what religion is about unless … what we grasp is the impossibility of grasping.⁶

Before going on too long with this line of thinking, though, it is necessary to give voice to an objection. Against the notion of religion as the impossibility of grasping, many will argue that religion is all about grasping, even more, that in its claims to the Divine or the Truth religion is the most grasping of human discourses. Religion, that is, makes claims about the ultimate nature of things and in doing so claims ultimate authority for a particular and ultimately very human vision of life. This, we must admit, is also true: if we consider the wide range of human religious behavior through history, there is little question that religion is never just or even primarily about what slips away; it is also, perhaps much more often, about locating and fixing, about assigning things to and keeping them in their place, about boundaries and identities, about the power that accrues to people, institutions, and traditions that control this process, and, all too often, about the murderously spiritual. We should acknowledge, then, that neither Williams nor Taylor captures the essence of Christianity or of religion and we should not assume that Williams is more of a real Christian, or really religious, than any number of contemporary fundamentalists. As Williams himself recognizes in the opening pages of Writing in the Dust, he is responding to terrible religious violence, violence the likes of which, as we know, religious people of all sorts—Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh—have visited on those they call heretics, apostates, or unbelievers. To my mind, both the attacks of September 11 and the response to these attacks by Christians such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are as much real religion as Williams’s powerful and admirable words.⁷

This is a book about how scholars study and represent religion; more precisely, it is about how scholars and others use the concept religion, a concept with a long, complicated, and still obscure history, to make sense of the world and themselves. I have opened with a step that will court the suspicion of many of these scholars. By invoking Williams, a theologian and, until recently, one of the world’s most powerful and influential religious leaders, I have ceded some authority for thinking academically about religion to a religious thinker. This violates a boundary that many of my colleagues consider to be absolutely necessary if the study of religion is to take its place as a legitimate academic enterprise, that is, the boundary separating secular academic thinking about religion from religious thinking about religion. This is, in some contexts, an important distinction to make. For example, it is one that I myself emphasize in my introductory classes. But it also is a distinction that when pushed too far becomes, or so I will argue, extremely elusive. And when we try to chase it down and force our studies of religion to hold to it, especially when we try to define and theorize religion in what I will describe as a secularist or locativist fashion, we lose sight of important matters and subtle differences. For one, we fall into a tendency to focus on how religious beliefs, practices, discourses, and institutions seek to grasp the world or bind God in ways that create and support forces of domination and violence and we tend not to explore in nuanced ways the possibility that religion has something to teach us about the impossibility of grasping. We become suspicious of religion—and of scholars who are not suspicious enough.

Suspicion does have its place, but after the Enlightenment and after the hermeneutics of suspicion we tend to see the grasping and binding aspects of religion everywhere. Has this led to a different type of grasping, a secularist binding of God? I think this, along with other factors that I will discuss below, leaves some of us who think and write about religion in a difficult place. I am not a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, or an adherent of any other religion; for all sorts of reasons, I would never describe myself as spiritual. I am, though, compelled by the depths of beauty and insight I see in Writing in the Dust, and I have spent a lot of time wondering and thinking about how I might respond to it and other instances of religion like it. Perhaps I could simply say that I am compelled by Williams’s humanity, but then I want to ask whether, and if so how, religious beliefs and practices are a force for cultivating such humanity. As a scholar and teacher of Religious Studies, what can I say about such beauty, insight, and humanity without being an apologist for religion and without trying, again, to grasp it? And then, should I even be thinking about religion in such apparently vague and ideologically loaded terms as beauty, insight, and humanity?

My academic expertise is in modern, Western religious thought. I am trained, then, to read theological words such as those we find in Williams in terms of their logics, their histories, and their rhetorical strategies. In addition, as a scholar of religion, I also think theoretically about religious thought as an instance of religion and inquire into the different disciplinary and inter- or transdisciplinary approaches we can take to religion. What do such lenses allow us to see and what do they prevent us from seeing? Finally, I also am trained to ask questions about this training, or, more generally, to be aware of and reflect on the historical and social contexts, the interests and ideologies, that have shaped the study of religion itself. Why do we even use this concept, religion? Where and who did it come from? What does it mean to study religion in an academic setting? It is precisely this self-consciousness about religion—and the increasingly prevalent self-consciousness about the secular—that leads me to wonder whether it has become too easy for scholars today, at least for those who take pride in their critical and theoretical consciousness, to grasp—that is, to historicize, contextualize, theorize, explain—the kinds of words Williams offers us.

Today we are exposed to an avalanche of books and articles, popular and scholarly, on religious ideology and religious violence. And many influential scholars of religion, reflecting on theoretical and methodological approaches to religion, argue, as I demonstrate below, that the defining characteristic of religious discourse is the kind of claim to absolute authority that is so effective in inspiring and rationalizing such violence. In such a context, it becomes easy to dismiss as mystification or cheap sentiment Williams’s pointless loving communication. And even if we feel the need to acknowledge and honor such words, it can be hard to know what, from an academic perspective (if that means a critical perspective), we can usefully say about it. But I believe that it is imperative that we do find ways to acknowledge, analyze, and evaluate such words, to think carefully and constructively about the way a thinker such as Williams combines compassion, hope, and theological commitment with realism and critical consciousness. This is not to say that we should not also continue to develop tools for analyzing the destructive power of religion. There are good arguments to be made that these tools are essential, today more than ever. But more than ever does not mean exclusively, for such exclusivity may well lead us to ignore, among other things, powerful religious resources for responding to violence. This would be a double failure, one ethical and one academic. That is, it would be a failure to attend to practices and ideas that may offer alternatives to dominating and destructive ideologies, whether religious or not, and it would be a failure to know religion in all its complexity and power.

Stories Ordinary and Extraordinary

Religion After Religion , Steven Wasserstrom’s fine study of Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Mircea Eliade, tells a story about modernity and the study of religion. According to Wasserstrom, what brought these great scholars together in the middle of the twentieth century was a desire to return religion to its original splendor. ⁸ This desire was shaped in and by the violence and chaos of their times, which Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade viewed as symptomatic of the dominance of modern rationality and technology. For them, to return religion was to recover religion’s essence: those symbols and myths that connect us with the depths of the human spirit. This was not simply a matter of identifying and understanding something about religion, to remind us of its splendor, but to reestablish it as a vital cultural force, even if only as a religion after religion. As Wasserstrom tells it, these scholars forged a kind of secular esotericism conducted outside of traditional religious contexts, a soteriologically vibrant conversation of like-minded intellects, a transcultural circle of intensively learned but entirely nonpracticing believers, an invisible congregation of the very few. ⁹ And, in doing so, they gave birth to the History of Religions not simply as a discipline, but as a discourse of resistance to modernity.

Wasserstrom expresses deep admiration for the figures at the heart of his story, yet he is critical of their project. Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade, he claims, were brilliant writers of religious history, but in their efforts to be both scholars and adepts, to write history about religion as part of an effort to challenge and change secularism, they pushed the history of religions in problematic directions. By reading religious history in a way that privileged myth and symbol as the key elements of a mystical transcendence of history, these thinkers deemphasized, even lost sight of, historical difference and the multiple ways religion works in history and society, in other words, the rich and disturbing detail and ambiguity of human religiosity that Wasserstrom contends must be at the center of any viable history of religions.

In this, I think Wasserstrom is right. It is necessary, though, to specify just how we approach the question of historical difference. Here, let me pursue this question by juxtaposing Wasserstrom’s story of the study of religion with two others.

There are many versions of the next story, but I will focus on the one that frames the introduction to one of many guides and companions to our discipline that have emerged in recent years, Guide to the Study of Religion, edited by Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon, a volume to which I will return in some detail in chapters 1 and 2. In his introduction to the volume, entitled simply Religion, Braun appeals to a common narrative about the development of critical, theoretical consciousness as an accomplishment of Western modernity. As the story goes, the establishment of the modern university, and of the human and social sciences, made possible the social-scientific and naturalistic theories of religion developed by Durkheim and others in the late nineteenth century. However, something went wrong in the middle of the twentieth century when Eliade and others (this is where Wasserstrom comes in) developed quasi-theological approaches to religion, for these came to dominate the field just as many of the independent departments of Religious Studies were being established in the United States. Consequently, so Braun and many others argue, the study of religion was established as an independent enterprise in the academy on very weak academic foundations and it is now long past time to rebuild the field from the ground up. Thus, Braun unapologetically dismisses paradigms for the field built on the concepts sacred and holy, such as Eliade’s, arguing that because they ultimately appeal to unverifiable, private experiences, they in fact only serve to mystify the way religion functions in human life, limiting the uncensored curiosity that should be the hallmark of academic study. Scholars of religion can and should protect and foster such curiosity by taking two steps. First, they should give up efforts to define the field in terms of some essential referent for religion—such as the sacred—and instead self-consciously construct the concept in a way that can produce real knowledge about human behavior. The concept of religion, rightly understood, is a scholarly tool used to allocate the stuff of the real world into a class of objects so as to position these objects for thought that is aimed toward explanation of their causes, functions, attractiveness to individuals and societies, relationships to other concepts, and so on.¹⁰ As a second step toward academic respectability, scholars should study religion as a social phenomenon, not as a matter of individual religious experience. The mission of the Guide is therefore to offer a variety of perspectives on an explanatory, naturalistic paradigm for the study of religion, one that views religion as one among other means by which human beings organize worlds, societies, and identities for themselves—in other words, as a key element in what Burton Mack, a contributor to the Guide, calls social formation.¹¹ For Braun, this approach makes the scholar of religion a social theorist and makes possible a research strategy that will allow the study of religion to become a contributing partner in the pursuit of a science of human social life, an exercise that could be credible within the family of human and social sciences in the modern university.¹²

Before commenting on Braun’s story, let me briefly turn to a third story, this from Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth. Like both Wasserstrom and Braun, Orsi claims that certain problematic religious assumptions and perspectives have had an undue influence on the study of religion. But where our first two stories focused on the resistance to modernity and secularism in Eliade and others, Orsi argues that in the early twentieth century a domesticated Protestantism adapted itself to modernity in a way that allowed it to retain a place in university culture, initially as the morally uplifting element of undergraduate teaching (oft en identified with the Humanities) and then, as the study of religion emerged, as the paradigm of religion studied in the academy.¹³ For Orsi, this paradigm not only has led to the establishment of a (particular form of) Christianity as the model against which other religions are defined and measured, but has impressed upon scholars the idea that religion is basically good. Excluded from the discipline, then, or relegated to the margins as primitive or immature are those religions that don’t measure up to the rationality, tolerance, peace, and spirituality of this domesticated Protestantism. Although we are a long way from having fully excavated all the assumptions and presumptions that limit the field, we are at a point where we can at least recognize that a primary challenge for scholars of religion is, as Orsi writes, not to stop at the border of human practices done in the name of the gods that we scholars find disturbing, dangerous, or even morally repugnant, but rather to enter into the otherness of religious practices in search of an understanding their human ground.¹⁴

The stories I have summarized here have some obvious affinities. For my purposes, the most important of these is that each sees the academic study of religion as marked by a problematic slippage between religion and the study of religion. As Wasserstrom puts it, here the subject and object of the study were confused, conflated, confounded.¹⁵ Where Wasserstrom identifies a more or less conscious effort to recover a generalized form of religiosity in response to historical circumstances, Braun and Orsi, though in different ways, identify a kind of unacknowledged theological remnant that has decisively shaped the field up to the present day. For all three, this confusion needs to be eliminated, for it has prevented scholars from addressing religion in all its complexity and from taking a properly academic perspective on it. The field is thus saddled with a problematic conceptual apparatus, one that deters scholars of religion from studying, for example, the ideological dimensions of religion, as Braun argues, or the dangerous and violent dimensions of religion, as Orsi argues. In a crucial sense, the moral for all three stories is that we need to pay more critical attention to the genealogy of the concept religion and to the theological and ideological forces that have exercised such influence on its past and that continue to shape our studies in the present.

These stories also are significantly different. Note, first, a further, though ultimately superficial, similarity: working through each of these stories is a distinction between what I will call ordinary and extraordinary religion. Wasserstrom shows how religion for Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade was an esoteric discipline that could interrupt the historical. He wants a History of Religion, however, that will direct us to the historical, ordinary, local forms of religion, where the abstracting and generalizing force of concepts such as myth and symbol will not obscure differences between religious traditions, ideas, and practices. For Braun and his coeditor Russell McCutcheon, the premise of their naturalistic, historical, and social approach to religion is, as McCutcheon puts it, that religion is utterly ordinary. This means that scholars of religion should focus their attention not on exalted states of mind and experience or on some posited transcendent referent, but on the everyday, ordinary activity of social formation (which, of course, often utilizes and