What is the study of religious practices to comprehend their meaning for their practitioners?
Criticizing organized religion
By "criticizing faith," I mean not the critique of the beliefs or practices of cocky-described religious individuals or groups but rather the critique of the concept of organized religion as a scholarly category. According to a number of scholars (often influenced by Foucauldian or post-colonial idea), the category of organized religion is deeply implicated in the history and practice of western statism and imperialism. The only advisable scholarly stance towards this object is one that is critical and skeptical. There are two main reasons for this suspicion.
The commencement is that religion is (equally Daniel Dubuisson in one case wrote) "the West's most characteristic concept, effectually which it has established and developed its identity." There is a deep and significant continuity between the Christian defense of the "truthful religion" and the nineteenth-century invention of "earth religions." The universalism of the concept masked an internally hierarchical classificatory scheme, which, as Tomoko Mazuzawa has shown, was crafted inside the crucible of the missionary and colonial run across. Not surprisingly, organized religion-making chop-chop became a tool of colonial and neo-colonial governance. The offset European missionaries had idea that the native peoples of the Americas or Africa had no organized religion—only "cultures" or "superstitions." In one case colonized, it was discovered that they did have religion later on all. Organized religion-making involved singling out certain social activities and cultural practices equally "religious" and de-politicizing them (see Hinduism in India). Nationalist elites, in turn, fought to deny the label of "faith" to national traditions (meet Shintoism in Nippon and Confucianism in China). Such struggles were political through and through, and it is impossible to discern any mutual core or essence to all the world religions, every bit Westward. C. Smith pointed out in 1962. Some religions do not have a deity; others are community-based rather than belief-based; and the purlieus betwixt them and secular ideologies such as nationalism is porous. Religion is a concept created by modern scholars and superimposed on a variety of different phenomena for a variety of motives. This had led some scholars, such as Tim Fitzgerald and Naomi Goldenberg, to describe the radical conclusion that the category of faith should be but abandoned.
The 2d ground for skepticism is that religion has served to define the western thought of the secular, and remains deeply entangled with it. For critics, this is visible in three different ways. Start, the secular state defines what religion is; faith is privatized as a faith whose object is the supernatural, and differentiates it from the natural and the rational which are the jurisdiction of the state. Such distinctions, notwithstanding, only serve to shore up the arbitrary ability that the state has to demarcate the sphere of its own sovereignty. Second, secular modernity is itself rooted in a distinctive Protestant anthropology, the ethos of which neatly maps onto a modern liberal subjectivity that encourages the individual to cultivate the autonomy and discipline required to relate to her beliefs and ends in the right style. Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have shown, for instance, that liberal secularism requires individual belief —not communal observance, rituals or embodied piety—to be taken every bit the essence of religiosity. 3rd, the secular separation between a privatized, individualized sphere of organized religion and a public, social, rational sphere of politics has obscured the way in which the state, the nation, and the law operate every bit the modern sacred. The mod sovereign state is grounded in a distinctive political theology that mobilizes the structural categories of metaphysics and theology to bolster and consolidate the higher identity of secular citizenship. According to William Cavanaugh's provocative thesis, the fact that Christianity is construed every bit a organized religion, whereas nationalism is non, ensures that the Christian'due south public and lethal loyalty belongs to the nation-land. Secularism, on this view, transfers the individual'southward "holy" loyalties away from the church building and towards the nation-state.
Even this cursory summary of this first arroyo is, I hope, sufficient to convey the strength and depth of the critique of religion. If religion is a western concept that has been used to shore up the authorisation of the colonial and sovereign country, through shifting, arbitrary demarcations between "religion" tradition, culture, reason, and the nation, so scholars should be wary of treating information technology as a stable, coherent object of academic study.
Upholding religion
The implications of the first arroyo have been resisted in many quarters. Here I focus on 2 objections—which, for ease of presentation, I telephone call the "anthropological" and the "normative" objection. (Note that no assumption is made near the bodily disciplinary location of scholars. Much of the interesting work washed in anthropology, folklore, and religious studies departments, for example, draws on both the first and the second approach).
The anthropological objection, baldly stated, claims that it is just not right or helpful to say that faith only functions as a term associated with western imperialist and neo-colonialist projects. Like almost abstract concepts, the concept of religion is a structure projected onto the earth, simply i consequence of this large-scale projection may well be that our world has genuinely come to exhibit information technology. Nor does the origin of a concept in itself discredit its uses: the concept may well have been forged in the crucible of missionary and colonial encounters, but its meanings and uses accept farther proliferated in not-colonial and mail service-colonial settings, in ways that escaped, distorted, and subverted the original soapbox. Information technology is a rich concept that connects to vocabularies that bring persons and things, desires, and practices in particular traditions in distinctive ways. Not surprisingly perhaps, the piece of work of those scholars who have most influenced the "critical religion" school, such as Asad and Mahmood, explicitly aims to provide a thick anthropological description of the complexity and multifariousness of religious feel—information technology brings out, for instance, the distinctive modes of Muslim religious subjectivity.
From this perspective, information technology would be a fault to think that conceptual imprecision is in itself an obstruction to scholarly enquiry. It may well be true that the boundaries between religion and other cognate concepts such as tradition, civilization, ideology, faith, reason, and and then along are porous and fuzzy. And it may well be true that there is no single essence to the concept of organized religion, no cadre defining feature that all conceptions of religion share. But mayhap we should apply to religion something like Ludwig Wittgenstein'due south theory of family resemblance. What Wittgenstein said about the concept of "game" also applies to the concept of "organized religion": the fact that we cannot identify a single feature that all religions exhibit does not mean that the concept of religion is meaningless. The concept exhibits "a complex continuum of resemblances and differences." In sum, the "anthropological" objection urges us to take both ordinary language and ordinary experience seriously.
The normative objection is slightly different. The worry hither is the hard-won liberal right to religious liberty will not elicit much respect if the existence of religion itself is radically questioned. On a related notation, the historical achievements of liberal secular states might be obscured if secularism is only perceived every bit a tool of colonial and imperial domination. Secularism and freedom of organized religion, in liberal idea, are connected to moral values such as private autonomy, moral self-conclusion, freedom of conscience equally well as more political ideals such every bit non-theocratic constitutional democracy, separation of church and country, and non-establishment of the ascendant religion. If nosotros get rid of the concept of organized religion, can we fairly express and protect those values?
As it happens, one grouping of influential political philosophers has tried to practise just that. For "egalitarian theorists of religious liberty" (as I call them), there is nothing special about religion as such. Religious behavior, in particular, are only 1 sub-set of a larger class, which political philosophers, following John Rawls, call "conceptions of the practiced." On this view, a liberal state protects, not just freedom of religion, only more generally liberty of censor; it disestablishes, not simply dominant religion, merely also any controversial conception of the good. And then neutrality, for liberals such as Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, is "generalized non-institution." Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom offer a compelling response to the "critical religion" school. They suggest that, fifty-fifty though historically the liberal state may take defined itself in relation to a problematic construal of organized religion, it has since broadened the scope of its moral concern, and is therefore less vulnerable to charges of ethnocentrism. Nevertheless we may wonder whether analogizing religion with "conceptions of the skillful" is satisfactory. I exercise not call back it is, although I cannot brand the full case here. Instead, I shall only sketch an alternative strategy.
Disaggregating religion
Let me go dorsum to the starting point of our research: Is organized religion a valid category of scholarly enquiry? The challenge is threefold: we must attend to the concerns of the critical religion school while, at the same time, exist sensitive both to the lived reality of religious experience and belief, and to the protection of the normative ideals underpinning freedom of religion in the law. How would a strategy of "disaggregating religion" assist here?
Kickoff, different disciplines will accept different answers to the question of what the concept of faith is for; and as a effect they will work with unlike conceptions of religion. Anthropologists, for example, legitimately study a fundamental dimension of human experience—the religious experience—in its diversity and unruliness. Theologians adopt a more content-based arroyo: they study the texts and dogma which capture our central dependence on a greater gild of things. Intellectual historians and students of political thought study religious traditions every bit coherent, inter-generational, scholarly bodies of thought—the "Islamic" or the "Christian" or the "Confucian" tradition, for case. These (and others) are all legitimate uses of the concept of organized religion. Then the starting point of the disaggregation strategy is to accept that, every bit religion is indeed non a "thing" but a term of art (information technology has different meanings in different contexts), unlike dimensions of information technology volition be appropriated in different ways in unlike disciplines.
Yet the strategy of "disaggregating religion" has a further, more than portentous implication for normative political theory. The specific question which political and legal philosophers (should) ask themselves is this. Which concept of religion—if whatsoever—do we need in the law of the liberal democratic land? How tin can we best identify and protect the normative values which historically have underpinned liberty of religion, non-establishment and the like? Egalitarian theorists of religious freedom, from this perspective, are right to seek to identify the normative grounds on which certain beliefs and practices call for state protection (or state restraint, in the case of non-establishment). They contend, for example, that exemptions from general laws can be justified on the footing of censor; and that what the land should not "establish" are conceptions of the good. A standard line of criticism against this egalitarian strategy has been to argue that it rests on a contested understanding of faith. Critics have pointed out that—past analogizing religion with individual conscience or conceptions of the skilful—liberalism reveals its Protestant, individualistic bias, and is unable to capture the fullness of the religious feel. The point has been made with detail acuity by legal scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan in her book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. She shows that the Get-go Subpoena Free Practise clause is quite incapable of capturing the pop, unruly, ritualized religiosity that she sees at work in the bizarre funerary displays in a Florida cemetery. Sullivan demonstrates that religion is too complex, too comprehensive, and as well multi-faceted to be adequately captured by the law of the liberal state. This is an important critique, which draws on what I accept called the first (critical) and the second (anthropological) arroyo to religion.
The disaggregating arroyo helps u.s.a. respond this critique. Beginning, as religion is non a "matter" only a term of art, it is perfectly legitimate—every bit suggested above—that dissimilar dimensions of it are appropriated in dissimilar disciplines and areas of life. To inquire that the law comprehend and depict the whole of social reality would be to yearn for a totalitarian law. Consider an analogy with marriage. The police does non describe and regulate the total experience of spousal relationship: the fact that, in law, matrimony is a contract does not mean that union is, or should be experienced as, a contract. Likewise, the fact that the police shows special concern for certain dimensions of organized religion—say, claims of private conscience—does not entail that religion is, or should be experienced as, individual conscience. From this perspective, the egalitarian strategy of analogizing religion is a productive one: the law should non capture "religion" as such, but whatever dimensions of religion are normatively salient and suitable for legal protection. And then critics confuse an empirical inquiry (describing what religion is) with a normative inquiry (accounting for its status in the law).
Second, however, we may enquire whether the normative illustration used by egalitarian theorists of religious freedom is the correct one. Reformulated in this way, Sullivan's critique has bite. It may well exist that egalitarian theorists accept picked a normatively problematic, or normatively narrow, analogy for religion. It may well exist, for case, that, in their exclusive focus on the claims of private conscience, egalitarian theorists have neglected the normative importance of other dimensions of lived religion, such as the centrality of traditional collective rituals to the moral lives of believers. Hence the proposed shift from an analogizing to a disaggregating strategy. This involves identifying a plurality of normative analogies for organized religion. Religion should be disaggregated into a number of different values which relate to the law of the liberal land in different means. We pick out, from the complex notion of "organized religion" that we have inherited, distinct elements and values that democratic law has good reason to protect. The disaggregated arroyo does not claim that it captures the fullness of the lived, anthropological reality of religion. But nor does it reduce the normative inscription of organized religion in the law to a narrow (often ethnocentric) ready of concerns and values.
Source: https://tif.ssrc.org/2014/02/05/three-approaches-to-the-study-of-religion/
0 Response to "What is the study of religious practices to comprehend their meaning for their practitioners?"
ارسال یک نظر