“What is critical religion?” A Response to Galen Watts and Sharday Mosurinjohn, “Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules?”

Abstract

Abstract The authors should be congratulated for writing about ‘critical religion’. Whatever else critical religion might or might not be, nothing could be more important than a critical inquiry into the categories that powerfully organise our knowledge and our institutions, including our universities. By publishing in a major journal, the JAAR, they bring into the mainstream significant topics that are habitually marginalised. They raise many valid points for public debate. Their article, however, is marred by reification and contradiction. To squeeze their generalisations into one journal article, the authors set up Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin and Timothy Fitzgerald as the core of an imaginary school, and then when they stumble on a possible disagreement between us, they accuse us of inconsistency. Speaking for myself, I explain why I have habitually used the term ‘critical religion’ to refer to my own work, and why I have recently considered abandoning it. I point out that the authors never properly discuss the genesis of the discourse on the non-religious secular, which is fundamental to any serious attempt to understand ‘critical religion’. They ignore my work on India and Japan. They nowhere discuss a central core of my own position, that religion is a member of a configuration of empty categories, including politics, nature, economy, and nation, a signalling system that is the source of hegemonic power and the illusions of enlightenment modernity. However, these shortcomings should not deter us from taking forward their work as a positive opportunity.