Religion as a category of governance and sovereignty

338 Pages·2015·1.926 MB·English

by  Timothy Fitzgerald, Trevor Stack, Naomi R. Goldenberg

Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty
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Supplements to Method & Theory
in the Study of Religion
Editorial Board
Aaron W. Hughes (University of Rochester)
Russell McCutcheon (University of Alabama)
Kocku von Stuckrad (University of Groningen)
VOLUME 3
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/smtr
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Religion as a Category of
Governance and Sovereignty
Edited by
Trevor Stack
Naomi R. Goldenberg
Timothy Fitzgerald
LEIDEN | BOSTON
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Cover illustration: Cover art by Cameron Montgomery, Dreamshare Photography,
[email protected]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Religion as a category of governance and sovereignty / edited by Trevor Stack, Naomi R. Goldenberg,
Timothy Fitzgerald.
  pages cm. -- (Supplements to method & theory in the study of religion, ISSN 2214-3270 ; volume 3)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-29055-6 (hardback : acid-free paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-29059-4 (e-book) 1. Religion and
politics. 2. Religion and state. I. Stack, Trevor, 1970- editor. II. Goldenberg, Naomi R., editor. III. Fitzgerald,
Timothy, 1947- editor.
 BL65.P7R43363 2015
 201’.72--dc23
2015007183
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering
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issn 2214-3270
isbn 978-90-04-29055-6 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-29059-4 (e-book)
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
List of Contributors VIII
1 Introduction 1
Trevor Stack
2 Who is Madame M? Staking Out the Borders of Secular France 21
Per-Erik Nilsson
3 “Citizens” and Their Stance toward “Religion” 38
Trevor Stack
4 “A New Form of Government”: Religious-Secular Distinctions in
Pueblo Indian History 68
Tisa Wenger
5 The Category of “Religion” in Public Classification: Charity
Registration of The Druid Network in England and Wales 90
Suzanne Owen and Teemu Taira
6 Sikhs, Sovereignty and Modern Government 115
Arvind-Pal Mandair
7 The Ancestral, the Religiopolitical 143
David U.B. Liu
8 Exclusive Pluralism: The Problems of Habermas’ Postsecular
Argument and the “Making of” Religion 182
Maria Birnbaum
9 Capabilities, Religionizing Effects and Contemporary Jewishness 197
Jeffrey Israel
10 Government, University and the Category of Religion: A Response
from Critical Theology 228
Brian Brock
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vi Contents
11 Negative Liberty, Liberal Faith Postulates and World Disorder 248
Timothy Fitzgerald
12 The Category of Religion in the Technology of Governance:
An Argument for Understanding Religions as Vestigial States 280
Naomi R. Goldenberg
13 Interrogating the Categories: Of Religion, Politics and the
Space Between 293
Geraldine Finn
14 Afterword 309
Naomi R. Goldenberg
Index 313
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Acknowledgements
The volume is the fruit of several workshops and conferences, including two
workshops in 2009, one at the University of Stirling, funded by the Critical
Religion Association, and the other at the University of Aberdeen, funded by
the European Commission’s cinefogo network; a conference in 2010 funded
and hosted by the British Academy; a 2012 workshop hosted by the Centre for
Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (cisrul) at the University of
Aberdeen; and a conference at the University of Uppsala in 2014, funded by
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Thanks are due to James King and Rose Luminiello
for copy-editing the volume.
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List of Contributors
Brian Brock
is Reader in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen,
Scotland. He earned his ma and PhD at King’s College, London. A theological
ethicist by training, he has a keen interest in theologically-oriented cultural
criticism and in constructive Christian ethics, especially as they relate to tech-
nological change. His most sustained theological interactions with contempo-
rary late-modern culture can be found in his book Christian Ethics in a
Technological Age, as well as in Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why
Science Needs the Church, edited with John Swinton. He is also the author of
Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture and
Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader.
Geraldine Finn
has a ba in English and Philosophy from Keele University (1969), an ma in
Philosophy from McMaster University (1971), and a PhD in Philosophy from
the University of Ottawa (1981). She is Professor of Cultural Studies and
Philosophy in the School for Studies in Art and Culture, and the Department of
Philosophy at Carleton University, Ottawa. Her area of expertise is twentieth
century Continental Philosophy and its relevance to contemporary interdisci-
plinary studies in culture and the arts. She has published widely on a variety of
issues at the intersection of philosophy, feminism, music(ology) and cultural
studies, and is currently working on two book-length studies: There is No Ethics
in the Language of Genes, and The Truth in Music.
Timothy Fitzgerald
is Reader in Religion at the University of Stirling. He is the author of The
Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford, 2000), Discourse on Civility and Barbarity:
A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (Oxford, 2007), and Religion
and Politics in International Relations: The Modern Myth (Continuum, 2011). He
is also the editor of Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations
(Equinox, 2007). At present he is completing a book about the category of
politics.
Naomi R. Goldenberg
is a professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics and Religious
Studies at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Her areas of specialization
include religion and popular culture, religion and gender, and religion and
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List Of Contributors ix
psychoanalysis. Her published work includes: Resurrecting the Body: Feminism,
Religion and Psychoanalysis (Crossroad, 1993) and Changing of the Gods:
Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Beacon, 1979). She is at work on
a book elaborating the argument that religions ought to be thought of as vesti-
gial states.
Jeffrey Israel
is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Williams College in Williamstown,
Massachusetts. His areas of specialization include modern Jewish political
theory, “religion” in political philosophy, and Jewish American thought and
culture. He is the co-author with Martha C. Nussbaum of Loving the Nation:
Toward A New Patriotism, which is under contract to Yale University Press. He
is currently writing a book that develops his normative political conception of
“play,” which draws heavily on the example of post-World War ii Jewish
American comedy.
David Liu
is a Visiting Scholar in Religion at Duke University. His teaching and research
have taken him diagonally through religion and science, languages, arts and
literature, theory and philosophy. In a current book project he proposes a
transcultural, post-Deleuzian metaphysics called “interaffectivity,” and in
another works out a critical theory of global posthumanist culture dubbed
“curiosity.” His newest essays concern Daoist me/ontology, ancient roots of
political theology, Webern and Adorno, and Nāgārjuna as philosopher of reli-
gion. As a translator and theorist of translation, David also promotes his native
Taiwanese as a written, literary tongue.
Arvind-Pal Mandair
is Associate Professor and sbsc Chair of Sikh Studies at the University of
Michigan. His recent publications include: Religion and the Specter of the West:
Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Translation (Columbia, 2009);
Secularism and Religion-Making (co-edited with Markus Dressler, Oxford,
2011); and Teachings of the Sikh Gurus (co-authored and co-translated with
Christopher Shackle, Routledge, 2005). He is a founding editor of the journal
Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture and Theory and is Assistant Editor of the
journal Culture and Religion, both published by Routledge.
Per-Erik Nilsson
is a postdoctoral researcher at Uppsala University in Sweden in the interdisci-
plinary research programme titled “The Impact of Religion.” His 2012 doctoral
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x List of Contributors
thesis Everybody Welcome to France: Secularism, Governmentality & Fantasy in
the French Republic 2003–2011 analyses the articulation of the French republic
as secular amongst the political elite, as well as the embrace of secularism by
the far right as a foundational identity marker. Nilsson has also written exten-
sively about popular culture, masculinity and the ideology of violence
(Barbarernas leende, Stockholm, 2011). He is currently working on a project
about grass-roots secularism in Turkey.
Suzanne Owen
is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at Leeds Trinity University.
She is author of The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum,
2008) and is currently working on her next monograph, Contemporary Druidry:
A Native Tradition?
Trevor Stack
directs the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law at the
University of Aberdeen, where he is also Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies.
He has published Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship
(University of New Mexico, 2012) and is completing a second monograph titled
Citizens: An Ethnographic Profile, while developing a comparative project that
asks the provocative question: What are churches, politically?
Teemu Taira
is researcher and Assistant Professor (Docent) in the Department of
Comparative Religion at the University of Turku, Finland. He is a co-author of
Media Portrayals of Religion and the Secular Sacred (with Kim Knott and
Elizabeth Poole, Ashgate, 2013) and co-editor of The New Visibility of Atheism in
Europe (with Ruth Illman, special issue of Approaching Religion, 2012). His
articles on the discursive study of the category of “religion” have been pub-
lished in journals such as Religion, Culture and Religion and Journal of
Contemporary Religion.
Tisa Wenger
is Assistant Professor of American Religious History at Yale Divinity School.
Her research explores the shifting categories of race, religion, and the secular
in nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. history. She is the author of We Have
a Religion: The Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious
Freedom (University of North Carolina, 2009), and is presently writing a book
that will chart the changing meanings and cultural politics of religious
freedom across U.S. history.
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