The wonderful Chris Corrigan wrote a post recently on how and whether to define ‘religion’, and as a long-time blogging conversation partner, it’s incumbent on me to comment. (Plus, it feels so good to weave links among personal blogs, just as we did in the Olden Times.) Chris treats the elusiveness of ‘religion’ as a feature, not a bug, even though the difficulty remains and causes some problems. (Fair condensation, Chris?)
This has been a longstanding issue in religious studies, which is 100% not my specialisation (though for a variety of reasons, beginning from the fact that Margaret read Relisious Studies for her undergrad degree, I’ve been caught up in the topic from the margin). Chris cites Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who was already looking worn around the edges when Margaret and I were studying him; I subsequently ended up teaching ‘Intro to Religious Studies’ at my first teaching post at Eckerd College, where I used exactly this problem as the axis of the course. I began with the Baseball Annie monologue that opens Bull Durham and a ‘Nacirema’ article about sport and ritual (I can’t find it now, annoyingly). We then worked through Preus’s Explaining Religion (spending more time on some chapters than others), mostly from my Wittgensteinian-inflected perspective. If I recall correctly, we ended with part of Nicholas Lash’s Easter In Ordinary. I should note that this was in time long past, when one could assign significant amounts of reading for a discussion-based course, and a reasonable proportion of the class would actually read the assignment.
This is some of the background I bring to responding to Chris, this along with extensive immersion in the critical theory of the ’80s and ’90s, with glancing blows from that literature since then.
So, now, to Chris’s post. First, as a priest and theologian and general church-going sort of person, I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do not hold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime (and at my age, I can’t assume I have a whole lot more time coming to me, though [I just checked] the UK government figures that guys such as I have a 50% chance of living to 86 — not bad) will afford, so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.
Now, I actually will get to Chris’s post. One implication of what I’ve said above at too great length is that I have no investment in ‘religion’ as a category (a ‘container’, in Chris’s terms, though his container does somewhat different work). I don’t look down the ‘Religions’ aisle at Tesco and select ‘Catholic-leaning Anglicanism’ from among options tht include Islam, Judaism, Hinduism (< a case in point about the difficulty in subsuming a way of life/worldview into the category of ‘religion’), Buddhism, Wicca, and various smaller-scale alternatives. Rather, what I observe about the world coheres most closely with what a long, broad tradition of Christian teachers and practitioners have said about the world.
My teachers and heroes have handed down the truth (more or less), and people who dissent from that are, as far as I can understand, just wrong about their dissent. That doesn’t mean they’re stupid or mad or evil, any more than I’d wish that they regard me as stupid/mad/evil. That humility and respect has twin roots in my philosophical training (while Margaret was reading religious studies, I was reading philosophy) and my theology; there are ways of being Christian (or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist) that claim a warrant (erroneously, by my lights) to inflict harm on people who don’t share their faith (or who share it wrongly), so it’s no special magic or blessing about professing faith in Jesus that insulates a Christian from possible error. Again, that’s why I may not pass judgement on anyone else.
So my participation in the public sphere entails a kind of partly pragmatic, partly æsthetic, partly theological-philosophical caution about making claims on behalf of Christian faith that I wouldn’t countenance from people who don’t share that faith, or who share if differently from me. But (annoyingly, again) I can no more presuppose that other citizens hold to the value and authority of ‘human dignity and peace and care’ or even ‘expertise’ (alas!) than that they adhere to the sound principles of catholic Anglican theology and worship. Some inhabitants of my community promote the idea that their party should be permitted to adjudicate every aspect of human possibility: how one reads, what one may say, to what sex or race or ethnicity one belongs (if any), who even may be allowed to live — and they will exercise that adjudicated conclusion by force. This may account for the decisive division in the world’s populace, the division between people who will negotiate how best to live together (on one hand) and people who will oblige others to live on their terms. This isn’t a specifically ‘religious’ division; many of the current crop of penny-ante fascists are straight-up nihilists (not even as thoughtful about such topics as a Western atheist). The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
I observe that this turns out to be less a conversation with Chris than a related, overlong blog post inspired by his. To offer at least a fig leaf of conversation, then, I’d say that when Chris uses the word ‘religion’ with reference to something that characterises me, I sense more of an arm’s-length tenor to his usage than I can identify with, and when he says something like ‘Religion is nothing special, except that it is accorded a special place in our civic life’ — man, even granted my scepticism about the term ‘religion’, I wouldn’t want to say that. Being Jewish certainly is special; being Muslim is special; being Buddhist — well, depending on how you’re talking, maybe it’s nothing, but maybe that’s still special; even being a dull old Anglican is special.
But there are few people I would trust more than Chris to undertake a respectful way of working through differences toward an irenic, fruitful, respectful way of civic life that has room even for us who adhere to something like a ‘religion’. If Nex?wlélex?wm were nearer Oxford, we could spend wonderful, productive, provocative afternoons and evenings talking through some of these things.