Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia

268 Pages·1997·16.444 MB·English

by  Russell T. McCutcheon

Manufacturing Religion
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Manufacturing Religion
The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion
and the Politics of Nostalgia
Russell T. McCutcheon
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1997
Oxford University Press
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 1997 by Russell T. McCutcheon
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCutcheon, Russell T., 1961-
Manufacturing religion : the discourse on sui generis religion and
the politics of nostalgia / Russell T. McCutcheon.
p. cm.
Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)—
University of Toronto, 1995.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-510503-6
1. Religion—Study and teaching—Methodology. I. Title.
BL41.M35 1997
200'.72—dc20 96-22755
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
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This book is dedicated
to my mother Claire (1925-1996),
and my brother Elliot (1949-1996),
both of whom left us far too soon
and too suddenly.
It is also dedicated to the woman who
continually fills my life with happiness,
my wife, friend, and love, Marcia,
"all curled up beneath your blanket."
Preface
The frontiers of a book are never clear cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and
the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it
is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences:
it is a node within a network.
—Michel Foucault
Where do books such as this come from? Can we trace their path and find their
origin? Can we fully acknowledge our debts? Foucault helps us to answer these
questions—but only a little—for his answer is that they come from such a vast
network of associations, both intentional and accidental, material and immaterial,
as to make them virtually impossible to trace with any accuracy. But this should
not lead us to conclude that there are not at least a few well-trod paths that we
can discern when we turn around. They are not the whole, that's most certain,
but they are important parts nonetheless. What follows are just some of the paths
that have conspired to lead me to the position I argue in the following pages.
The first issue of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion contained an article
that had a formative influence on the present work: Neil McMullin's critique
(1989a) of the ideological nature of the Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade 1987). Al-
though it makes an important individual scholarly contribution, for me the main
influence of McMullin's critique is directly linked to the way in which it became
part of a relatively minor, but a no less important, controversy in the field. In
other words, I was struck by the form of the debate even more than its content,
for in the following issue the editors published Gary Ebersole's letter (1989), which
took issue with the "content and tone" of McMullin's article. Ebersole was both-
ered by the way in which McMullin engaged in "Eliade 'bashing'" rather than
making what was, in his opinion, "any substantial contribution in terms of a
new method or approach to the study of religion" (238). He was also troubled by
the way Eliade was lumped together "with two amorphous (faceless and name-
less) groups—his 'fellow religionists' ... and the 'well-known "Chicago School"
of Religious Studies' and/or his 'co-religionists' " (238). Ebersole concludes that
McMullin's article "has little place in a serious journal and unfortunately has
viii Preface
marred your initial issue. I trust that with the proper editorial control future issues
will raise the level of intellectual discourse" (240).
Upon first reading this exchange — and it is an exchange that deserves to be
read in full, including McMullin's reply as well as Robert Segal's (1989a, 1989c
own article to which Ebersole was also replying — I was immediately struck by how
Ebersole's letter, calling for "serious" and "substantial" scholarship and tighter
editorial control, brought to mind a passage of Noam Chomsky's that I had re-
cently read and underlined: "The system protects itself with indignation against a
challenge to the right of deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of sub-
jecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or out-
rage, though it is often masked in other terms [i.e., calls for exclusion/silencing
through higher academic standards]" (1991: 9). Reading Ebersole's letter, through
the critical apparatus provided by Chomsky, suggested that indeed a sociopolitical
and discursive consensus — even hegemony — currently operates by means of ide-
ological strategies in the study of religion.
Most of all, it was McMullin's reply to Ebersole that struck a chord with me:
The production of new methods and approaches in the study of 'religion' has been
a major industry for a long time now, but much of that energy has been expended
in the generation of methods and approaches that are based on widely accepted
but highly problematic notions of what constitutes 'religion.' If Professor Ebersole
is calling for yet more methods and approaches of that species, then I would ask,
to what avail? (1989b: 250)
It is clear to me now that this book is in large part an effort, whether conscious
or not, to further substantiate and elaborate on what I find to be McMullin's
insightful criticism — a criticism that extends far beyond what has commonly been
termed the Chicago school. In at least this one light, then, my work can be read
as an extended effort first to delineate clearly the lines of the regnant discourse, to
name the ideological processes that function to establish and perpetuate it, and, in
so doing, to identify some of the "names and faces" that constitute its various
sites. Simply put, it is an effort to answer the following three questions: "what is
the shape of the regnant Religious Studies discourse, why does it have the shape
that it does, and what/whom is being served by it?" (McMullin 1989b: 244).
In developing answers to these questions, this book has been further influ-
enced by such works as Jonathan Z. Smith's Imagining Religion (1982) and Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988). Indeed, my very
title will no doubt be evidence of my debt to these two sources. Following Smith,
I contend that the category of religion is a conceptual tool and ought not to be
confused with an ontological category actually existing in reality. In other words,
our use of the scholarly category of religion is theoretically based, a model not to
be confused with reality — whatever that may or may not be. However, Smith's
title does not suggest the practical and material uses of such categorial creations.
Preface ix
Herman and Chomsky's critical study of the role media plays not simply in re-
flecting public opinion but in actually constructing it in such a way so as to be
consistent with the policies and interests of the powerful provides the necessary
corrective to the idealist connotations of Smith's title. However, in terms of Her-
man and Chomsky's methodology, I do not employ their propaganda model, be-
cause such a model presumes that observable and documented similarities among,
in their case, the mass media, the corporate sector, the military, and government
policy are evidence of an intentional alliance. As I argue in chapter 6, although
speculations on the possible reasons for the similarities between, for example, mass
media and scholarly representations of Vietnamese self-immolations of the early
1960s are largely beyond this book, to depict and understand the relations in terms
of propaganda alone is far too simplistic. The propaganda model overlooks the
diverse ways in which members of a hegemonic system participate in the definition,
coordination, articulation, and experience of dominance.
It was my readings of such works as Ivan Strenski's Four Theories of Myth in
Twentieth-Century History (1987), Sam Preus's Explaining Religion: Criticism and
Theory from Bodin to Freud (1987), and Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge
(1989) that brought the general outline of this project into focus for me. Only in
hindsight, after returning to Strenski's book, but this time as a resource in one of
my own courses, did I realize the extent to which it had influenced my own
thought. For instance, even though I did not have his work consciously in my
mind at the time of conceiving of my title, the relations between, for example, my
own title and thesis, on the one hand, and the quotation from his introduction
which begins my own, on the other hand, should indicate that portions of
Strenski's work were highly influential in my thinking. Although I do not, as he
did, attempt to recover the intentions of the actors whose scholarship I critique, I
do attempt to link material and social implications to what might otherwise be
considered abstract, disembodied philosophical work; in this regard I owe much
to his earlier efforts.
The influence of Preus's recovery of a coherent, alternative tradition in the
study of religion, what he terms the naturalistic paradigm, can be seen throughout
this book. By naturalism, I read Preus as meaning the effort to study religion as a
part of human culture and history. Naturalists simply presume that "religion could
be understood without the benefit of clergy" and without needing "commitments
about its causes different from the assumptions one might use to understand and
explain other realms of culture" (Preus 1987: x). Because I attempt to avoid ques-
tions concerning the truth of religious claims, as the wonderful quotation from
Thomas Huxley that opens this book should make clear, the harsher understanding
of naturalism as "repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities
or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation" (Danto
1967: 448) is not put forward here. Nor is my use of the term "naturalism" to be
equated with the ideological strategy of naturalization, that is, making ontological