Modern Religion, Modern Race
Theodore Vial
Abstract
Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned in religious contexts or when we are discussing religion. By analyzing key figures at the birth of the modern world, the world that in turn gave birth to our ideas of religion and race, we can see how the concepts of religion and race are structured, we can see how they continue to be employed as we make sense of the world and do the work of comparative religions, and we can see how religion and race are linked. The structure of these concepts and their foundational role in the social imaginary of the modern world ar ... More
Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned in religious contexts or when we are discussing religion. By analyzing key figures at the birth of the modern world, the world that in turn gave birth to our ideas of religion and race, we can see how the concepts of religion and race are structured, we can see how they continue to be employed as we make sense of the world and do the work of comparative religions, and we can see how religion and race are linked. The structure of these concepts and their foundational role in the social imaginary of the modern world are not apparent if we end our genealogies of race and religion in the Enlightenment, as most scholars do. The book examines the writings of Kant’s heirs and antagonists Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Max Müller. It is the generation of thinkers and activists associated with early German Romanticism and sometimes called “expressivists” who work out what has become the theory of human nature that has come to dominate the modern West. This way of thinking about what it means to be fully human links the very identity of individuals to the groups to which they belong, especially religions and races. We disdain the racist language of some of the founders of the discipline of religious studies but the very structure of the concepts they bequeath us leads us, unwittingly, to reiterate many of the same distinctions and hierarchies.
Keywords:
religion,
race,
genealogy,
religious studies,
comparative religions,
expressivism,
Kant,
Herder,
Schleiermacher,
Müller
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190212551 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: August 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190212551.001.0001 |
