Fluent Essays

In 6 pages (double spaced) ANSWER THREE of the following FOUR questions (3 of 4), based on class readings, discussions, and lectures. 1. Religious pluralism is a central problem for contemporary theology. While world religions advance competing truth claims, there is a great need for tolerance and respect between them. In different ways, Swami Vivekananda and Leslie Newbigin both address issues of religious pluralism. Compare and contrast their approaches. How do Newbigin and Vivekananda, respectively, talk about religious pluralism? Where do they overlap, and what are the key differences? What is your assessment? What are the key strengths and limitations of each approach? Which do you find more compelling? 2. James Cone and Delores Williams offer two different contextual theological visions; Delores Williams both builds upon and critiques James Cone’s Black theology of liberation. Compare and contrast their theological approaches to liberation. What are the distinctive elements of each theological vision? What are the key differences, and what are the practical implications of those differences? Which do you find more compelling, and why? 3. Both Elizabeth Johnson and Kate Bowler offer critiques of traditional approaches to theodicy. Theodicy is the theological problem of reconciling belief in a good God with the presence of evil and/or suffering. More generally, many philosophies give an account explaining or justifying the existence of evil and/or suffering (e.g. Social Darwinism). How does Johnson and/or Bowler challenge these explanations? Identify one theodicy you have seen offered in the world today, and briefly describe the argument in a general way. Explore how Johnson and/or Bowler might critique this idea. What is your assessment? What are the critical issues involved, and where does your chosen theodicy fall short? What would a more adequate response look like? 4. In different ways John Thatamanil and Gloria Anzaldúa both challenge how we think about religion and identity. Compare and contrast their approaches. What are the key elements of each author’s challenge to religion as a category of identity? What are points of connection/similarity, and what are key differences? What is your assessment? What are key questions or problems raised by this comparison? Which do you find more compelling, and why? SWAMI VIVEKANANDA’S SPEECH AT WORLD PARLIAMENT OF RELIGION, CHICAGO RESPONSE TO WELCOME Sisters and Brothers of America, It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects. My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honour of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering remnant Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee." The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilisation and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal. Why We Disagree 15 Sep 1893 I will tell you a little story. You have heard the eloquent speaker who has just finished say, "Let us cease from abusing each other," and he was very sorry that there should be always so much variance. But I think I should tell you a story which would illustrate the cause of this variance. A frog lived in a well. It had lived there for a long time. It was born there and brought up there, and yet was a little, small frog. Of course the evolutionists were not there then to tell us whether the frog lost its eyes or not, but, for our story's sake, we must take it for granted that it had its eyes, and that it every day cleansed the water of all the worms and bacilli that lived in it with an energy that would do credit to our modern bacteriologists. In this way it went on and became a little sleek and fat. Well, one day another frog that lived in the sea came and fell into the well. "Where are you from?" "I am from the sea." "The sea! How big is that? Is it as big as my well?" and he took a leap from one side of the well to the other. "My friend," said the frog of the sea, "how do you compare the sea with your little well?" Then the frog took another leap and asked, "Is your sea so big?" "What nonsense you speak, to compare the sea with your well!" "Well, then," said the frog of the well, "nothing can be bigger than my well; there can be nothing bigger than this; this fellow is a liar, so turn him out." That has been the difficulty all the while. I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Mohammedan sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world. I have to thank you of America for the great attempt you are making to break down the barriers of this little world of ours, and hope that, in the future, the Lord will help you to accomplish your purpose. Paper on Hinduism Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893 Three religions now stand in the world which have come down to us from time prehistoric--Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Judaism. They have all received tremendous shocks and all of them prove by their survival their internal strength. But while Judaism failed to absorb Christianity and was driven out of its place of birth by its all-conquering daughter, and a handful of Parsees is all that remains to tell the tale of their grand religion, sect after sect arose in India and seemed to shake the religion of the Vedas to its very foundations, but like the waters of the seashore in a tremendous earthquake it receded only for a while, only to return in an all-absorbing flood, a thousand times more vigorous, and when the tumult of the rush was over, these sects were all sucked in, absorbed, and assimilated into the immense body of the mother faith. From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the low ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place in the Hindu's religion. Where then, the question arises, where is the common centre to which all these widely diverging radii converge? Where is the common basis upon which all these seemingly hopeless contradictions rest? And this is the question I shall attempt to answer. The Hindus have received their religion through revelation, the Vedas. They hold that the Vedas are without beginning and without end. It may sound ludicrous to this audience, how a book can be without beginning or end. But by the Vedas no books are meant. They mean the accumulated treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different times. Just as the law of gravitation existed before its discovery, and would exist if all humanity forgot it, so is it with the laws that govern the spiritual world. The moral, ethical, and spiritual relations between soul and soul and between individual spirits and the Father of all spirits, were there before their discovery, and would remain even if we forgot them. The discoverers of these laws are called Rishis, and we honour them as perfected beings. I am glad to tell this audience that some of the very greatest of them were women. Here it may be said that these laws as laws may be without end, but they must have had a beginning. The Vedas teach us that creation is without beginning or end. Science is said to have proved that the sum total of cosmic energy is always the same. Then, if there was a time when nothing existed, where was all this manifested energy? Some say it was in a potential form in God. In that case God is sometimes potential and sometimes kinetic, which would make Him mutable. Everything mutable is a compound, and everything compound must undergo that change which is called destruction. So God would die, which is absurd. Therefore there never was a time when there was no creation. If I may be allowed to use a simile, creation and creator are two lines, without beginning and without end, running parallel to each other. God is the ever active providence, by whose power systems after systems are being evolved out of chaos, made to run for a time and again destroyed. This is what the Brahmin boy repeats every day: "The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and moons of previous cycles." And this agrees with modern science. Here I stand and if I shut my eyes, and try to conceive my existence, "I", "I", "I", what is the idea before me? The idea of a body. Am I, then, nothing but a combination of material substances? The Vedas declare, "No". I am a spirit living in a body. I am not the body. The body will die, but I shall not die. Here am I in this body; it will fall, but I shall go on living. I had also a past. The soul was not created, for creation means a combination which means a certain future dissolution. If then the soul was created, it must die. Some are born happy, enjoy perfect health, with beautiful body, mental vigour and all wants supplied. Others are born miserable, some are without hands or feet, others again are idiots and only drag on a wretched existence. Why, if they are all created, why does a just and merciful God create one happy and another unhappy, why is He so partial? Nor would it mend matters in the least to hold that those who are miserable in this life will be happy in a future one. Why should a man be miserable even here in the reign of a just and merciful God? In the second place, the idea of a creator God does not explain the anomaly, but simply expresses the cruel fiat of an all-powerful being. There must have been causes, then, before his birth, to make a man miserable or happy and those were his past actions. Are not all the tendencies of the mind and the body accounted for by inherited aptitude? Here are two parallel lines of existence--one of the mind, the other of matter. If matter and its transformations answer for all that we have, there is no necessity for supposing the existence of a soul. But it cannot be proved that thought has been evolved out of matter, and if a philosophical monism is inevitable, spiritual monism is certainly logical and no less desirable than a materialistic monism; but neither of these is necessary here. We cannot deny that bodies acquire certain tendencies from heredity, but those tendencies only mean the physical configuration, through which a peculiar mind alone can act in a peculiar way. There are other tendencies peculiar to a soul caused by its past actions. And a soul with a certain tendency would by the laws of affinity take birth in a body which is the fittest instrument for the display of that tendency. This is in accord with science wants to explain everything by habit, and habit is got through repetitions. So repetitions are necessary to explain the natural habits of a new-born soul. And since they were not obtained in this present life, they must have come down from past lives. There is another suggestion. Taking all these for granted, now is it that I do not remember anything of my past life? This can be easily explained I am now speaking English. It is not my mother tongue, in fact no words of my mother tongue are now present in my consciousness; mut let me try to bring them up, and they rush in. That shows that consciousness is only the surface of the mental ocean, and within its depths are stored up all our experiences. Try and struggle, they would come up and you would by conscious even of your past life. This is direct and demonstrative evidence. Verification is the perfect proof of a theory, and here is the challenge thrown to the world by the Rishis. We have discovered the secret by which the very depths of the ocean of memory can be stirred up-try it and you would get a complete reminiscence of your past life. So then the Hindu belives that he is a spirit. Him the sword cannot pierce-him the fire cannot burn-him the water cannot melt-him the air cannot dry. The Hindu belives that every soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere, but whose centre is located in the body, and that death means the change of this centre from body to body. Not is the soul bound by the conditions of matter. In its very essence it is free. unbounded. holy, pure, and perfect. But somehow of other it finds itself tied down to matter and thinks of itself as matter. Why should the free, perfect, and pure being be thus under the thraldom of matter, is the next question. How can the perfect soul be deluded into the belief that it is imperfect? We have been told that the Hindus shirk the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; an the question and say that no such question can be there. Some thinkers want to answer it by positing one or more quasi-perfect beings, and use big scientific names to fill up the gap. But naming is not explaining. The question remains the same. How can the perfect become the quasi-perfect; how can the pure, the absolute, change even a microscopic particle of its nature? But the Hindu is sincere. He does not want to take shelter under sophistry. He is brave enough to face the question in a manly fashion; anmmortal, perfect and infinite, and death means only a change of centre from one body to another. The present is determined by our past actions, and the future by the present. The soul will go on evolving up or reverting back from birth to birth and death to death. But here is another question: Is man a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foamy crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolling to and fro at the mercy of good and bad actions--a powerless, helpless wreck in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect; a little moth placed under the wheel of causation which rolls on crushing everything in its way and waits not for the widow's tears or the orphan's cry? The heart sinks at the idea, yet this is the law of Nature. Is there no hope? Is there no escape?--was the cry that went up from the bottom of the heart of despair. It reached the throne of mercy, and words of hope and consolation came down and inspired a Vedic sage, and he stood up before the world and in trumpet voice proclaimed the glad tidings: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! even ye that reside in higher spheres! I have found the Ancient One who is beyond all darkness, all delusion: knowing Him alone you shall be saved from death over again." "Children of immortal bliss" --what a sweet, what a hopeful name! Allow me to call you, brethren, by that sweet name--heirs of immortal bliss--yea, the Hindu refuses to call you sinners. Ye are the Children of God, the sharers of immortal bliss, holy and perfect beings. Ye divinities on earth--sinners! It is a sin to call a man so; it is a standing libel on human nature. Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion that you are sheep; you are souls immortal, spirits free, blest and eternal; ye are not matter, ye are not bodies; matter is your servant, not you the servant of matter. Thus it is that the Vedas proclaim not a dreadful combination of unforgiving laws, not an endless prison of cause and effect, but that at the head of all these laws, in and through every particle of matter and force, stands One "by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain, and death stalks upon the earth." And what is His nature? He is everywhere, the pure and formless One, the Almighty and the All-merciful. "Thou art our father, Thou art our mother, Thou art our beloved friend, Thou art the source of all strength; give us strength. Thou art He that beareth the burdens of the universe; help me bear the little burden of this life." Thus sang the Rishis of the Vedas. And how to worship Him? Through love. "He is to be worshipped as the one beloved, dearer than everything in this and the next life." This is the doctrine of love declared in the Vedas, and let us see how it is fully developed and taught by Krishna, whom the Hindus believe to have been God incarnate on earth. He taught that a man ought to live in this world like a lotus leaf, which grows in water but is never moistened by water; so a man ought to live in the world--his heart to God and his hands to work. It is good to love God for hope of reward in this or the next world, but it is better to love God for love's sake, and the prayer goes: "Lord, I do not want wealth, nor children, nor learning. If it be Thy will, I shall go from birth to birth, but grant me this, that I may love Thee without the hope of reward--love unselfishly for love's sake." One of the disciples of Krishna, the then Emperor of India, was driven from his kingdom by his enemies and had to take shelter with his queen in a forest in the Himalayas, and there one day the queen asked him how it was that he, the most virtuous of men, should suffer so much misery. Yudhishthira answered, "Behold, my queen, the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade love." The Vedas teach that the soul is divine, only held in the bondage of matter; perfection will be reached when this bond will burst, and the word they use for it is therefore, Mukti-- freedom, freedom from the bonds of imperfection, freedom from death and misery. And this bondage can only fall off through the mercy of God, and this mercy comes on the pure. So purity is the condition of His mercy. How does that mercy act? He reveals Himself to the pure heart; the pure and the stainless see God, yea, even in this life; then and then only all the crookedness of the heart is made straight. Then all doubt ceases. He is no more the freak of a terrible law of causation. This is the very centre, the very vital conception of Hinduism. The Hindu does not want to live upon words and theories. If there are existences beyond the ordinary sensuous existence, he wants to come face to face with them. If there is a soul in him which is not matter, if there is an all-merciful universal Soul, he will go to Him direct. He must see Him, and that alone can destroy all doubts. So the best proof a Hindu sage gives about the soul, about God, is: "I have seen the soul; I have seen God." And that is the only condition of perfection. The Hindu religion does not consist in struggles and attempts to believe a certain doctrine or dogma, but in realising--not in believing, but in being and becoming. Thus the whole object of their system is by constant struggle to become perfect, to become divine, to reach God and see God, and this reaching God, seeing God, becoming perfect even as the Father in Heaven is perfect, constitutes the religion of the Hindus. And what becomes of a man when he attains perfection? He lives a life of bliss infinite. He enjoys infinite and perfect bliss, having obtained the only thing in which man ought to have pleasure, namely God, and enjoys the bliss with God. So far all the Hindus are agreed. This is the common religion of all the sects of India; but, then, perfection is absolute, and the absolute cannot be two or three. It cannot have any qualities. It cannot be an individual. And so when a soul becomes perfect and absolute, it must become one with Brahman, and it would only realise the Lord as the perfection, the reality, of its own nature and existence, the existence absolute, knowledge absolute, and bliss absolute. We have often and often read this called the losing of individuality and becoming a stock or a stone. "He jests at scars that never felt a wound." I tell you it is nothing of the kind. If it is happiness to enjoy the consciousness of this small body, it must be greater happiness to enjoy the consciousness of two bodies, the measure of happiness increasing with the consciousness of an increasing number of bodies, the aim, the ultimate of happiness being reached when it would become a universal consciousness. Therefore, to gain this infinite universal individuality, this miserable little prison- individuality must go. Then alone can death cease when I am one with life, then alone can misery cease when I am one with happiness itself, then alone can all errors cease when I am one with knowledge itself; and this is the necessary scientific conclusion. Science has proved to me that physical individuality is a delusion, that really my body is one little continuously changing body in an unbroken ocean of matter; and Advaita (unity) is the necessary conclusion with my other counterpart, soul. Science is nothing but the finding of unity. As soon as science would reach perfect unity, it would stop from further progress, because it would reach the goal. Thus Chemistry could not progress farther when it would discover one element out of which all others could be made. Physics would stop when it would be able to fulfil its services in discovering one energy of which all the others are but manifestations, and the science of religion becomes perfect when it would discover Him who is the one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an ever-changing world. One who is the only Soul of which all souls are but delusive manifestations. Thus is it, through multiplicity and duality, that the ultimate unity is reached. Religion can go no farther. This is the goal of all science. All science is bound to come to this conclusion in the long run. Manifestation, and not creation, is the word of science today, and the Hindu is only glad that what he has been cherishing in his bosom for ages is going to be taught in more forcible language, and with further light from the latest conclusions of science. Descend we now from the aspirations of philosophy to the religion of the ignorant. At the very outset, I may tell you that there is no polytheism in India. In every temple, if one stands by and listens, one will find the worshippers applying all the attributes of God, including omnipresence, to the images. It is not polytheism, nor would the name henotheism explain the situation. "The rose called by any other name would smell as sweet." Names are not explanations. I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, "If I abuse your God, what can He do?" "You would be punished," said the preacher, "when you die." "So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu. The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, "Can sin beget holiness?" Superstition is a great enemy of man, but bigotry is worse. Why does a Christian go to church? Why is the cross holy? Why is the face turned toward the sky in prayer? Why are there so many images in the Catholic Church? Why are there so many images in the minds of Protestants when they pray? My brethren, we can no more think about anything without a mental image than we can live without breathing. By the law of association, the material image calls up the mental idea and vice versa. This is why the Hindu uses an external symbol when he worships. He will tell you, it helps to keep his mind fixed on the Being to whom he prays. He knows as well as you do that the image is not God, is not omnipresent. After all, how much does omnipresence mean to almost the whole world? It stands merely as a word, a symbol. Has God superficial area? If not, when we repeat that word "omnipresent", we think of the extended sky or of space, that is all. As we find that somehow or other, by the laws of our mental constitution, we have to associate our ideas of infinity with the image of the blue sky, or of the sea, so we naturally connect our idea of holiness with the image of a church, a mosque, or a cross. The Hindus have associated the idea of holiness, purity, truth, omnipresence, and such other ideas with different images and forms. But with this difference that while some people devote their whole lives to their idol of a church and never rise higher, because with them religion means an intellectual assent to certain doctrines and doing good to their fellows, the whole religion of the Hindu is centred in realisation. Man is to become divine by realising the divine. Idols or temples or churches or books are only the supports, the helps, of his spiritual childhood: but on and on he must progress. He must not stop anywhere. "External worship, material worship," say the scriptures, "is the lowest stage; struggling to rise high, mental prayer is the next stage, but the highest stage is when the Lord has been realised." Mark, the same earnest man who is kneeling before the idol tells you,"Him the sun cannot express, nor the moon, nor the stars, the lightning cannot express Him, nor what we speak of as fire; through Him they shine." But he does not abuse any one's idol or call its worship sin. He recognises in it a necessary stage of life."The child is father of the man." Would it be right for an old man to say that childhood is a sin or youth a sin? If a man can realise his divine nature with the help of an image, would it be right to call that a sin? Nor even when he has passed that stage, should he call it an error. To the Hindu, man is not travelling from error to truth, but from truth to truth, from lower to higher truth. To him all the religions, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, mean so many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite, each determined by the conditions of its birth and association, and each of these marks a stage of progress; and every soul is a young eagle soaring higher and higher, gathering more and more strength, till it reaches the Glorious Sun. Unity in variety is the plan of nature, and the Hindu has recognised it. Every other religion lays down certain fixed dogmas, and tries to force society to adopt them. It places before society only one coat which must fit Jack and John and Henry, all alike. If it does not fit John or Henry, he must go without a coat to cover his body. The Hindus have discovered that the absolute can only be realised, or thought of, or stated, through the relative, and the images, crosses, and crescents are simply so many symbols--so many pegs to hang the spiritual ideas on. It is not that this help is necessary for every one, but those that do not need it have no right to say that it is wrong. Nor is it compulsory in Hinduism. One thing I must tell you. Idolatry in India does not mean anything horrible. It is not the mother of harlots. On the other hand, it is the attempt of undeveloped minds to grasp high spiritual truths. The Hindus have their faults, they sometimes have their exceptions; but mark this, they are always for punishing their own bodies, and never for cutting the throats of their neighbours. If the Hindu fanatic burns himself on the pyre, he never lights the fire of Inquisition. And even this cannot be laid at the door of his religion any more than the burning of witches can be laid at the door of Christianity. To the Hindu, then, the whole world of religions is only a travelling, a coming up, of different men and women, through various conditions and circumstances, to the same goal. Every religion is only evolving a God out of the material man, and the same God is the inspirer of all of them. Why, then, are there so many contradictions? They are only apparent, says the Hindu. The contradictions come from the same truth adapting itself to the varying circumstances of different natures. It is the same light coming through glasses of different colours. And these little variations are necessary for purposes of adaptation. But in the heart of everything the same truth reigns. The Lord has declared to the Hindu in His incarnation as Krishna,"I am in every religion as the thread through a string of pearls. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and extraordinary power raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I am there ." And what has been the result? I challenge the world to find, throughout the whole system of Sanskrit philosophy, any such expression as that the Hindu alone will be saved and not others. Says Vyasa, "We find perfect men even beyond the pale of our caste and creed. " One thing more. How, then, can the Hindu, whose whole fabric of thought centres in God, believe in Buddhism which is agnostic, or … How Not to Be a Religion Page 1 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 Common Goods: Economy, Ecology, and Political Theology Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Catherine Keller, and Elias Ortega-Aponte Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780823268436 Published to Fordham Scholarship Online: May 2016 DOI: 10.5422/fordham/9780823268436.001.0001 How Not to Be a Religion Genealogy, Identity, Wonder John Thatamanil DOI:10.5422/fordham/9780823268436.003.0003 Abstract and Keywords The constitution, marginalization, and return of a phenomenon that is anything but ancient suggests that we must attend to and interrogate the very configuration of religion qua religion (and the secular as secular—with the political putatively residing securely within the secular) instead of venturing a project that seeks to define the proper relationship between the “religious” and “the political” in a fashion that presumes to know securely what these two are. Too often, conversation proceeds under the assumption that we know what it means to be religious and to be political but just don’t yet know how these two modes of being ought to be properly related. This paper contests these assumptions in conversation with William Connolly’s decades-long refusal of secularism, a salutary posture that does not presume that the “religious” and the secular political can be tightly cordoned off from each other. I also offer an account of the religious—sensitive to the genealogical constitution of that very category—that can aid in the important work of rendering identity fluid and always under construction rather than as a reified site of contestation. Keywords:   politics, religion, secularism On the Curious Talk of Religion’s Return or Resurgence Sociologists, political theorists, and theologians now not only recognize that the long forecasted death of religion has failed to materialize but observe instead that religion has returned, with teeth: Diehard with a Vengeance, starring not Bruce Willis but Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the United States, Narendra Modi and the BJP in India, and Mohamed Morsi and the University Press Scholarship Online Fordham Scholarship Online How Not to Be a Religion Page 2 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. But just what is this “religion” that has returned? Where was it in the offing? What if secularization is itself responsible for the invention of “religion”? Or put more precisely, what if “the secular” and “the religious” both coemerge from the process of modernization? What if modernity invented religion precisely in order to marginalize it?1 On such an account, “resurgent religion” may be best understood as a politicized version of a relatively recent creation. What returns is not what was once dismissed. But if religion is in fact a late development, then religion cannot be imagined as always already there waiting to be distilled out from adventitious accretions and then confined to the private sphere. The constitution, marginalization, and resurgence of a phenomenon that is anything but ancient suggest that we must interrogate the very configuration of religion qua religion (and the secular qua secular—with the political securely residing within the latter) before venturing projects that attempt to stipulate the proper relationship between the religious and the political. Too often, conversation proceeds under the assumption that we know what the religious and the political essentially and even transhistorically are but just don’t yet know how these provinces of culture ought properly to be related. Such assumptions are unwarranted if the very meaning of these notions is (p.55) subject to historical reconfiguration. Particularly problematic is the assumption that contemporary politicized religion constitutes a return to the proper and antique form of religions prior to modernity. This anachronism fails to consider what has become of traditions when they became religions. True, ancient traditions were privatized and depoliticized at the birth of modernity, but politicizing their contemporary offspring does not constitute a return to the status quo ante. This chapter contests these assumptions under the influence of William Connolly’s decades-long refusal of secularism.2 Connolly felicitously leaves open the relationship between the political/ secular and the religious in a salutary posture that does not presume to know what we mean by these categories. By appeal to a variety of historical and genealogical projects that have alerted us to the provinciality of the category “religion,” I will suggest that politicized religions—the noun rather than the adjective is the problem—pose special challenges to a robust and healthy civic life. The alternative to politicized religions, however, is not a thinned-out secularism of the sort that Connolly rightly rejects. The task at hand is not to depoliticize religions but to dereligionize them. To depoliticize is to domesticate traditions and to impoverish public life; to dereligionize, by contrast, is to set religious traditions free from the constraints that come with being religions. Religious communities are thereby enabled to participate in public life in a capacious and generous spirit. The work of dereligionizing traditions must be distinguished from the work of deprivatizing them because far more than privatization took place when traditions became (configured as) religions. No comprehensive list of features of religion making can be enumerated herein, but I suggest that when traditions became religions—or presented themselves as religions on the global stage —they acquired the following features: textualization, literalization, creedalization, reification, and fetishization. When a tradition so configured becomes politicized, the result is politically mobilized actors who lack the capacities and sensibilities that make for what Connolly calls a generous “ethos of engagement.”3 Religionization has served to coarsen and harden constructions of identity. Or more accurately still, a new category of identity arose alongside the invention of religion, namely religious identities. I am thinking here by analogy to the invention of the category of race. Just as the invention of the category “race” makes possible the invention How Not to Be a Religion Page 3 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 of racial identities, so the invention of religion gives rise to religious identities. An example: The Jewish people have existed for millennia, but Jews have not always understood themselves to be members of a religion and hence as having religious identities.4 Many still do not. “Religious identities” have become sites of acrid contestation because of the factors enumerated above. Hence the task at hand must be to mitigate, if (p.56) not reverse, the features that risk rendering religious identities toxic. We must detextualize, deliteralize, decreedalize, dereify, and defetishize our traditions. This “we” refers first to theologians and their analogs in the respective traditions, but this labor of dereligionization can and must be supplemented by the work of religious studies scholars, genealogists, and political philosophers such as William Connolly. An especially problematic feature of the process of religionization is that it seems to marginalize critical therapeutic regimens installed within all of our religious traditions, practices of self- cultivation, pratiques de soi, that function to transform and mobilize identity otherwise.5 That is, all of our traditions contain within them programs for self-cultivation that serve to contest and render malleable conventional configurations of identity. Hence, to engage in Buddhist forms of meditation is to undergo a process whereby one comes to see that there is no enduring substantial self and eventually, in Mahayana traditions, to dismiss the idea that any-thing exists apart from its relationship to all other “things.” Hence, Buddhist practices go so far as to contest attachment even to the idea of being Buddhist and, in the most radical of Buddhist teachings, one’s attachment to the Buddha and his dharma. The most rigorous forms of such self-cultivation were available often only to religious elites like monastics, but they enjoyed a prestige and centrality in the life and work of the tradition nonetheless. But as traditions became creedalized—as traditions were reconstructed as centered more on belief than practice—the work of transforming the body-mind complex by means of therapeutic regimens has become marginalized.6 Might one hypothesize that diminished attention to practice has something to do with the fact that traditions relinquished and ceded the authority to discipline bodies to the state? Whatever the causal factors may be, the ritual and contemplative work of self-cultivation has steadily receded as traditions became religionized. It may be the case that contemporary SBNR (“spiritual but not religious”) discourse reflects a felt impoverishment that follows from a dissipation of attention to the body and to practice. We have come now to such an impasse that we cannot, by and large, look to theologians to talk about the role of spirituality and self-cultivation on political life and the promise of such discipline for robustly pluralist civic space. Rather, we must look to a Nietzschean-Deleuzian atheist to teach us once more about the recursive labor of self-cultivation. The Invention of Religion, or the Work of “Religion-Making” Beginning with the work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Talal Asad, there has been a growing appreciation in religious studies that the category “religion” is an elusive category, not least because although it has about it an antique aura, (p.57) its usages and meanings, upon closer inspection, show themselves to be of recent vintage.7 The suspicion grows that regnant notions about religion are provincial, not only because they are relatively new but also because of their Western provenance. Persons must be tutored to think of some aspects of life as “nonreligious” or secular in order to conceive of other aspects of life as properly “religious” and vice versa. This work of imagination is anything but universal, and its origins can be traced, albeit with great How Not to Be a Religion Page 4 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 patience and persistent historical excavation. We must ask when, where, how, and why the West first learned to make this distinction between the religious and the secular. To raise these questions is to set about learning to see at work in history the process of what Arvind-Pal Mandair and Markus Dressler call “religion-making.” Mandair and Dressler describe what they mean by “religion-making” as follows: We conceived of “religion-making” broadly as the way in which certain social phenomena are configured and reconfigured within the matrix of a world-religion(s) discourse. In other words, the notion refers to the reification and institutionalization of certain ideas, social formations, and practices as “religious” in the conventional Western meaning of the term, thereby subordinating them to a particular knowledge regime of religion and its political, cultural, philosophical, and historical interventions.8 Time does not permit us to generate a rich picture of what Mandair, Dressler, and their colleagues mean by religion-making, but it suffices for now simply to name that such a process has in fact taken place and taken place globally but differentially and with varying tempos. Such a process, although it has earlier roots, reaches its culmination in and with modernity. Indeed, a case can be made that a, perhaps the, constitutive feature of modernity is precisely the invention of religion through this work of religion-making, a process that generates as its correlate the space of the secular as the nonreligious. The phrase “religion-making” serves to dispel the notion that religion has always already been there waiting for moderns to discover and distill out from its adventitious accretions, such as economics and politics. The latter domains can subsequently be rationalized and governed by the state, thereby freeing religion to go about its proper business, often configured as the work of making transcendental/transempirical claims and saving souls. A failure to appreciate the point that “religions” have to be made can give rise to slippery discourse of the following sort: (1) Religion once existed but was politicized; (2) then modernity came along, and religion was privatized and hence purified to be what it truly is; (3) and now post-and antimoderns have come to appreciate that (p.58) religion was always intrinsically political and so seek to include it once more as a political actor in the public sphere. Such talk can fall prey to the errant conviction that religion remains a steady and stable configuration throughout these transformations with politics as the only variable. One catches a possible hint of this anachronistic error in the work of the otherwise fine recent book by Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, when they write that in “the shift from the secular to the postsecular,” … we indicated how the privatization of religion, which conformed to the modern secular norm, was in effect a depoliticization of religion, and correlatively, that the postsecular might thereby be understood as a repoliticization of religion by its recognition of the inherently political nature of all forms of religion.9 Taken at face value—likely a bad idea when dealing with scholars of the caliber of Crockett and Robbins—this claim suggests that there exists a stable reality, a certain something called religion, that stays constant save for modernist interruption. The genealogists say otherwise. As Talal Asad, Richard King, Timothy Fitzgerald, Tomoko Masuzawa, and many others have shown, religion is not a transhistorically constant reality.10 Religion is made/invented and not out there to be found.11 If the genealogists of religion are right, and I believe they are, it follows also that Crockett’s and Robbins’s inspirations—Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud—are mistaken to think that How Not to Be a Religion Page 5 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 there is a transhistorical reality called religion, the nature of which is misconstrued by religious people, but nonetheless genuinely real and properly to be explained by some mode of reductionism. Close attention to the processes of religion-making, in concrete historical detail, has served to dispel the taken-for-granted Western sense that the category religion has always enjoyed universal recognition and meaningfulness. On the contrary, in some cases, scholars can date with striking precision just when a people had to learn to use the category. Jason Ananda Josephson’s recent and impressive work, The Invention of Religion in Japan, is an especially telling entry into the scholarly literature on the genealogy of religion.12 Josephson can date the moment when it became necessary for Japanese translators to first figure out the meaning of the word “religion”: the arrival of American warships off the coast of Japan on July 8, 1853.13 On that date, Josephson notes, the Americans insisted that they would not leave until two letters were presented to the Japanese emperor, letters that twice contained the word “religion.” After this arrival and over the course of subsequent decades, the Japanese had not only to make sense of the foreign word “religion” but were then, as Josephson shows, compelled to reconfigure Japanese life in such (p.59) fashion that some dimensions of culture could be demarcated as religious and others as not. As Josephson shows, this work was not one of distilling out a discretely religious sphere already there waiting to be discovered and named when the right category arrived on the historical stage.14 What do such histories and genealogies mean for statecraft and for political life broadly construed? What can the Japanese instance teach Western political theorists and culture workers about the ways in which the category “religion” structures our imaginations and, by way of our imaginations, the organization of our political lives? The invention of religion qua religion—a complex, multidirectional global process—was a process of privatization and transcendentalization.15 Around these processes is retrospectively projected a sense of threatening danger—the sense that religion can be a kind of potent, virulent force that, unless defanged and depoliticized, will ineluctably usher in violence. Thankfully, so it goes, for the sake of the religions and religious people themselves, the violent propensities of religion are not intrinsic and native to religion. Religion, “properly understood,” can be severed from its putatively reactionary impulses and function richly in the private lives of a nation’s citizens so long as religion does not seek to reemerge into the public square and make claims thereupon.16 Ironically, though we are not yet historically in a position to fully appreciate the dynamics at play, I have begun to suspect that the invention of religion on these terms may have created the very conditions for the peculiarly dangerous and virulent forms that religion now takes. When our traditions become religionized, they give rise to rigid and inflexible configurations of identity that threaten to interrupt pluralist possibilities. I refer to the following taken-for-granted notions of what it means to be a religion: Religion is taken to be defined by singular and exclusive claims to allegiance. You can be a part of only one religion at a time. The various religions are innately incommensurable. Religious identity is one kind of identity among others, but different from all others because it is marked by a necessary and final nonnegotiability. How Not to Be a Religion Page 6 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 Most peculiar, as W. C. Smith noted quite some time ago, are the processes by which the loyalty of religious persons has been shifted away from the “object” of devotion—namely God or ultimate reality—to one’s religion as such.17 If W. C. Smith is right that “religion” itself has now become an object of devotion, then it has also become configured in modern imagination as a fragile, imperiled, and contested mode of identity —one that must be protected (p.60) perhaps at any cost. We can well imagine that religion so configured might become a threatening reality when politicized.18 The Marks of Religionization Early in this chapter, I listed a number of marks of religionization, namely textualization, literalization, creedalization, reification, and fetishization. These marks are characteristic features that religious traditions take on when they become religionized. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but these factors do nonetheless play a determinative role in the work of transforming rich, variegated, porous traditions into religions. Not all of these markers are equally prevalent in the various religions, but I am hard-pressed to think of religions that have altogether escaped these processes. The global production of religion through colonial encounter largely takes place after the category of religion was formulated in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and European conflict occasioned by the Reformation. The quest to define religion and identify its essence was prompted by the desire to overcome such conflict by identifying what all religions putatively have in common. A variety of voices conspired in that conversation, including prominent Deists such as Lord Herbert of Cherbury.19 Nonetheless, although this claim cannot be defended herein, what has come most decisively to shape regnant understandings of religion is no generic or Deist version of the same but rather a specifically Protestant understanding thereof. The Deists themselves were operating within a Protestant ethos, one, for example, that constantly criticized so-called superstition and the prevalence of “priestcraft.” This Protestant specificity accounts for and is evident in the marks of religionization I will now consider. The modern process of religionization, it is well understood, seems to require textualization. To be a proper candidate for the status of a world religion, one must have a scripture, a sacred text, which is taken to be the authoritative deposit of a tradition’s primordial revelation.20 Traditions lacking such a text are unlikely to win for themselves membership in the family of world religions. Traditions in which a single text or canon of texts have heretofore played only a marginal role must be reconfigured to foreground their importance and thereby also the importance of elite textualists who claim custodianship over those texts. Once such texts and textual traditions are identified, constructions of authentic religious identity itself are closely linked to such texts; internal diversity is diminished as textual strands come to stand in as normative for traditions as a whole. The Sanskritization and Brahminization of Hinduism make up but one marked example of the wholesale reconfiguration of a tradition in which many Hindus remain illiterate and so necessarily marginalized when their tradition is textualized. (p.61) Once texts are identified that can serve as central scriptures—the Bhagavad Gita for Hinduism, for example—they have become subject in modernity, increasingly, to literalistic readings. Mythic Hindu deities are now said to have specific sites of birth, and the quest commences to find a historical Krishna and a historical Rama. Those who remember the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque by the Hindu Right and the violent shock waves that resulted How Not to Be a Religion Page 7 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal use (for details see www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Columbia University; date: 14 January 2019 therefrom will not find it difficult to discern the toxic consequences of literalization: This violence is, at least in part, a consequence of the claim that the Babri Masjid rests on just that patch of ground that happens to be the literal birthplace of Rama.21 What precisely do we mean by literalization? Here, I am indebted to oral conversations with the Boston University philosopher Harold Oliver.22 Oliver argued that modernity’s notion of literal truth is the remainder of a double negation. The process begins when Enlightenment critics of religion assert the proposition “The myths of religious traditions are not literally true.” Persons who then take themselves to be defenders of these traditions retort, “It is not true that our myths are not literally true.” The precipitate of this double negation is a peculiarly modern conception of literal truth. Readers of ancient and premodern Christian writers know that the fathers had ready to hand a variety of conceptions of truth; even what premoderns meant by “literal truth” is far removed from any modernist construal of the same. In and through the process of literalization, these expansive and variegated conceptions of truth are lost to view, and a constricted conception of literal truth wins out. This process takes place first in the Enlightenment critique of the Christian tradition but is then exported through colonial encounters, and literal conceptions of truth gain global currency.23 When traditions become religions, they also become creedalized. Through colonial contact, Christianity, configured as a religion, serves as prototype for other would-be religions. Thereafter, one finds, for example, the creation of Buddhist catechisms.24 Under the influence of creeds and catechisms, religions are constituted as centered on beliefs, and faith is often understood as cognitive assent to these aforementioned lists of propositions. The primary question to be posed to persons in other traditions is, “What do you believe?” on the assumption that belief trumps practice. Orthodoxy comes to shape if not define even orthopraxic traditions. Reification, about which W. C. Smith has written a great deal, refers to the processes by which historically malleable and porous traditions come to be constructed as fixed, transhistorically static, tightly integrated and bounded conceptual systems (possessed of a single dominant metanarrative or an internally consistent transtemporal deep grammar). Under the influence of such notions, religious belonging is construed to be an exclusive matter, and multiple (p.62) religious participation is marginalized. If religions are tightly bounded and characterized by incommensurable deep grammars that lead to necessarily incompatible doctrines of salvation, then it is a mark of incoherent and misguided syncretism for persons and communities to be deeply shaped by more than one religion. That is just not the sort of thing a religion is. This reification of traditions, however, runs counter to fluid patterns of belonging that characterized much of East Asia and even South Asia prior to modernity. By fetishization, I refer to the processes by which the religions—configured as described above— become the objects of religious devotion. Wilfred Cantwell Smith makes this point with inimitable flair: The notion that a religion is a nice thing to have, even that it is useful, has arisen, as it could arise only, in a secular and desperate society. Such a notion is a kind of blasphemy, to those whose faith is sensitive. One has even reached a point today where some Christians can speak of believing in Christianity (instead of believing in God and in Christ); of preaching Christianity (instead of preaching good news, salvation, redemption); of practicing Christianity (instead of practicing love). Some even talk of being saved by How Not to Be a Religion Page 8 of 18 PRINTED FROM FORDHAM SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.fordham.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Fordham University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in FSO for personal …