The Sacred Is the Profane: The Political Nature of "Religion"
William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon
Abstract
It has become increasingly recognized in the field of religious studies that the very idea of “religion”—the founding concept of our area of study—is an idea with a history, specifically a modern and Western history. Yet this recognition has not extended beyond the narrow boundaries of theoretical discourse in the field, and so has had little influence on how “religious” data are actually described and studied, and even on how they are explained. This book argues that the concept of a particular, bounded, and distinctive realm of human behavior that can be designated as “religion” is a politic ... More
It has become increasingly recognized in the field of religious studies that the very idea of “religion”—the founding concept of our area of study—is an idea with a history, specifically a modern and Western history. Yet this recognition has not extended beyond the narrow boundaries of theoretical discourse in the field, and so has had little influence on how “religious” data are actually described and studied, and even on how they are explained. This book argues that the concept of a particular, bounded, and distinctive realm of human behavior that can be designated as “religion” is a political invention of modernity, and that its salience persists only because of its continued political utility. In essence, “religion” is a modern folk category that derives its cogency only from Western political projects, and as such carries too much baggage to help us classify the imaginative productions of culture, a task for which it was never designed. This argument ends up being important in several ways: In this book's approach to the data, it designates “religious” and the kinds of analyses of this data that are found satisfying for theorizing “religion” as a human (i.e., nonsupernatural, but also more or less universal) phenomenon, and for the ways in which we understand our putatively nonreligious behaviors, symbols, and discourses.
Keywords:
religion,
religious studies,
politics,
modernity,
secularism,
definition
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199757114 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2013 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199757114.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
William Arnal, author
University of Regina
Russell T. McCutcheon, author
University of Alabama
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