Key Categories in the Study of Religion; Contexts and Critiques; King

Edited by

Rebekka King [+–]

Middle Tennessee State University

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Rebekka King, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on the negotiation of boundaries within North American Christianity. Her first book (under contract with NYU Press) charts the development of progressive Christianity in North America as a movement that spurned Christian orthodoxy in pursuit of a resolutely skeptical faith. She teaches courses on method and theory, anthropology of religion, and contemporary Christianity.

Key Categories in the Study of Religion builds upon the groundwork laid by previous NAASR Working Papers titles in order to bring us full circle to the symbiotic relationship between context and critique. This volume assembles diverse sets of data to consider pertinent categories in which critique occurs. By looking at intentionally disparate case studies, the volume centers on four key contextual categories which stand at the heart of the academic study of religion: Citizenship and Politics, Class and Economy, Gender and Sexuality, and Race and Ethnicity. The contributors to this volume explore questions concerning how scholars construct such categories and/or critique scholars who do? Who decides how to approach the critical study of these topics? What impact does the context of a scholar’s research have on the means and method of a given critique? Using these enquiries as a starting point, Key Categories in the Study of Religion investigates the ways that method, theory, and data are mobilized via context as the primary impetus for critical analysis.

Under the purview of the aforementioned specific categories, this volume brings together diverse data domains to explore the similarities and differences that emerge when one theoretical framework moves from domain to domain. In the same way that scholars have argued against an essentialist understanding of “religion,” so too should the key categories of analysis upon which this volume focuses be employed within the matrix of their social, cultural, and ideological contexts.

Each section begins with an orienting essay that explores its category. These introductory chapters include: i) an analysis of the construction of categories in academic literature; ii) an argument either advocating or critiquing scholarship carried out in that vein; and iii) an exploration of its implications for the study of religion. Each chapter is followed by four responses authored by scholars intentionally selected to highlight diverse contexts: subjects, fields, and methods. They extend the orienting essay’s conclusions by offering novel analysis vis-à-vis their own scholarly expertise and subject matter. These chapters underscore instances of both congruence and difference to further refine our understanding of possible forms of critique relevant to each category.

For those wishing to buy chapters only: Please note that due to the shorter extent of chapters individual Parts will be sold as a unit rather than individual chapters.

Series: NAASR Working Papers

Introduction

Introduction: Critique in Context [+–] 1-5

Rebekka King FREE

Middle Tennessee State University

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This volume considers four social categories prominent in religious studies: citizenship and politics; race and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; and class and economy. In doing so, it offers an opportunity to redescribe these categories. Like religion, they are not natural or self-evident categories, but they are often treated as such. A failure to adequately theorize them leaves us without any real starting point for analysis. Thus, this volume’s premise is to establish an analytical framework in which the same redescription warranted to the study of religion might be likewise provided for critical categories qua the study of religion. Each section opens with a main essay that addresses the category’s currency and its application within the author’s research specialization. Michael McVicar, Richard Newton, Megan Goodwin, and Suzanne Owen each offer a redescription of the approach scholars of religion might take to their category. These opening chapters are followed by response chapters with an eye toward expounding the category. The respondents were asked to take up the themes of the chapter with special attention to category and show how it might be applicable in new contexts. Rather than repeating the category, they were asked to explore how it worked or did not when applied to divergent contexts. In doing so, we hoped to provide a multivocal conversation that might resonate with readers who could place their own potential contributions in conversation with the primary essays and the responses.

Part I: Citizenship and Politics

1. Paper Terrorism: Religion, Paperwork, and the Contestation of State Power in the “Sovereign Citizen” Movement [+–] 9-30

Michael J. McVicar £17.50

Florida State University

Michael J. McVicar is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State
University. He teaches classes on American religious history and is the author of Christian
Reconstruction: R. J. Rushdoony and American Religious Conservatism (2015)

This chapter explores some of the religious problems associated with the “sovereign citizen” movement in the United States. By focusing on “paper terrorism”—the extralegal bureaucratic paperwork associated with the sovereign citizenship movement—this chapter challenges conventional attempts in religious studies to frame political resistance movements such as the sovereign citizen movement in terms of a unique, irreducible religious worldview. Instead, it emphasizes how some religiously inspired resistance movements can be understood as by-products of state and corporate activities rather than autonomous manifestations of some deeper human search for religious or spiritual meaning.

2. The Rohingya, Buddhism, and the Category “Religion” [+–] 31-41

Tenzan Eaghll £17.50

Independent Scholar

Tenzan Eaghll is an independent academic and author based in Hong Kong. His research
focuses on the intersection of the film studies, method, and theory in the study of religion,
continental philosophy, and History of Religions. He is the co-editor of Representing Religion in Film and the creator and co-host of the podcast Fascism in Cinema.

3. Citizenship, Religion, and the Frailty of Secular Sovereignty [+–] 42-54

Daniel Miller £17.50

Landmark College

Daniel D. Miller is Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought and Chair of the Department of Liberal Studies at Landmark College. His research interests include religion, secularism, and political theory; radical democratic political theory; and Queer Theory. His first book, The Myth of Normative Secularism: Religion and Politics in the Democratic Homeworld (Duquesne University Press) was published in 2015. He is currently writing his second book, which theorizes a radical democratic polity as queer body politic.

Michael J. McVicar demonstrates that so-called “paper terrorism” and the “sovereign citizen” movement are significance as representations of the religious contestation of state power. This chapter extends elements of McVicar’s analysis to argue that phenomena like the sovereign citizen movement reveal frailty at the heart of political sovereignty, one of the most taken-for-granted concepts within modernity, by disrupting the effective exercise of territorially defined authority that constitutes it. This disruption, in turn, threatens the legitimacy of the modern state, the socio-political model that currently structures global politics. Finally, the chapter argues that the specific case of Alecia Faith Pennington illustrates the distinctive role that “religion,” the modern sense of which has emerged only in distinction from the concept of the sovereign state, plays in the contestation of state sovereignty and the revelation of the political state’s ultimately contingent nature.

4. The Material Production of Otherworldly Citizenship: From Paper to Digital Files to Bodies [+–] 55-66

Lauren Horn Griffin £17.50

Louisiana State University

Lauren Horn Griffin is assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Her teaching and research focus on religion, politics, media, and technology.

This chapter explores the physical (including digitized) materials that authorize and produce citizenship, analyzing the varieties of alternative “nations” or “worlds” get imagined through these regimes of paperwork. In the first section, I ask how those imagined communities shape the discourses on identities and either challenge or maintain normative conceptions of American national identity. In the second section, I explore the move from paper to the digital (including biometrics) as mediators of citizenship, raising questions about the changes that digitization might bring in society’s relationship to identity formation and to memory.

5. Paper Terrorism as Counter-Conduct [+–] 67-70

Michael J. McVicar £17.50

Florida State University

This chapter offers a brief reflective response to the other contributions in the “Citizenship and Politics” section of this book. It returns to the problem of the “sovereign citizen” movement to consider the problem of nationalism as it relates to contemporary religious identities. The chapter use the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault to argue that the “paper terrorism” legal techniques of sovereign citizens can be interpreted as “counter conducts” that reject nationalism in favor of a more amorphous and troubling concept of citizenship that strives to escape conventional mechanisms of state discipline.

Part II: Race and Ethnicity

6. Signifying “Der Rassist” in Religious Studies and the Axes of Social Difference [+–] 73-91

Richard W. Newton, Jr. £17.50

University of Alabama

Richard Newton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. He is author of Identifying Roots: Alex Haley and the Anthropology of Scriptures(Equinox Publishing Ltd., 2020) and former editor of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion. Newton is also curator of the social media professional development network, Sowing the Seed: Fruitful Conversations in Religion, Culture and Teaching (SowingTheSeed.org).

This essay argues that religion and race are categories of analysis that are more politically charged than liberal/progressive academic rhetorics let on. I argue that rather than sites to champion liberation or inclusion, these terms should be understood historically as axes of social difference. Furthermore, social theorists should map the way these and comparable terms operate in the politics of identification, the framing of culture, and the obscuring of our own critical theorizing.

7. Of Dualisms and Doppelgängers: Mapping Ancient Minds and Bodies in Religious Studies [+–] 92-99

Robyn Faith Walsh £17.50

University of Miami

Robyn Faith Walsh is Associate Professor of the New Testament and Early Christianity at
the University of Miami, Coral Gables. An editor at the Database of Religious History, her
articles have appeared in Classical Quarterly and Jewish Studies Quarterly, among other publications. Her first monograph, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture was recently published with Cambridge University Press.

Reflecting on the work of Richard Newton, this chapter critiques certain racist and nationalist viewpoints inherited from Romanticism that persist in the study of Religion— among these are speculative theories on so-called Aryan history, the origins of language, and the moral-psychology of the ancients. Essential to this discussion is a reflection on, as Newton describes, “how we narrate… intellectual heritage” and expertise, from the scholars and research we cite to the adaptation of speculative theories that can come to govern our everyday lives and assumptions.

8. Dark S(k)in: Two Versions of Newton’s Crimen Oscuro [+–] 100-103

Rudy Busto £17.50

University of California, Santa Barbara

Rudy Busto is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Religious Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests include: American religion, race and religion, and religions and science fiction. He authored the book King Tiger: The Religious Visions of Reies Lopez Tijerina, The Gospel According to Rice: The Next Asian American Christianity (2005) and has published articles for many journals including the Amerasian Journal and <>The Religious Studies Project.

9. Reworking Our Schemes [+–] 104-111

Craig Prentiss £17.50

Rockhurst University

Craig R. Prentiss is a Professor of Religious Studies at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of Staging Faith: Religion and African American Theater from the Harlem Renaissance to World War II (NYU 2014), and editor of Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction (NYU 2003).

Building on Richard Newton’s reference to the Combahee River Collective, I use the Collective’s strategy for re-imagining the prevailing classificatory model for personhood as a starting point to move us toward reconstituting the relationship between religion and race as schemes for social ordering. This essay theorizes religion and race as positioning instruments made effective by linking the historical and the contingent to the eternal and the permanent through a discourse that conjures the latter to shape the conditions of the former.

10. That’s a Racist Question: Interrogating Racism in the Study of American Religions [+–] 112-122

Martha Smith £17.50

Fullerton College

Martha Smith is Professor of Religious Studies at Fullerton College in Southern California. Her current research and teaching interests include North American religious diversity and pluralism, race and ethnicity studies, diversity and social justice. Her courses focus on the diversity of the American religious landscape, especially the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity are connected to religious identities and the significance of material culture and lived religious experience in American life.

This chapter responds to Richard Newton’s thesis by excavating American religious history through a recognition of the racist past of religious studies and a productive reckoning with that past. To do this, the chapter acknowledges that scholars of religion must recognize the ways the field has historically reproduced structures of racism and think critically about our own roles in the use and perpetuation of those structures via the category of race.

11. The Trope Has Been Set: Race and Religion as Critical Entanglement [+–] 123-131

Richard W. Newton, Jr. £17.50

University of Alabama

This essay is a response to a response on how to theorize the category “race” in the academic study of religion. It present a defense of the argument that both race and religion operate as axes of social difference to be critically redescribed (or mapped) by scholars. This response clarifies and expounds upon how that thesis could be taken up in four subfields: ethnic studies/critical race studies, the history of religion, biblical studies, and American religious history.

Part III: Gender and Sexuality

12. The Field is Not One/The Body is Smart: Rethinking Theory in the Study of Religion [+–] 135-145

Megan Goodwin £17.50

Northeastern University

Dr. Megan Goodwin is Program Director of Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded program hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion. Her first book, Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions, is now available through Rutgers University Press. With Dr. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, she hosts and produces Keeping It 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion Podcast.

13. A Happy Headache [+–] 146-150

Emily D. Crews £17.50

University of Chicago Divinity School

Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School and uses historical and ethnographic methods to make sense of the ways that religion, gender, and the reproductive body are entangled in the formation of personhood.

14. Addressing Gender Parity in Critical Pedagogy [+–] 151-155

Tara Baldrick-Morrone £17.50

University of Tennessee

Tara Baldrick-Morrone is Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee

15. The “Muscle Jew” and Maccabean Heroism of the Jewish Legion during World War I [+–] 156-161

Tim Langille £17.50

Arizona State University

Tim Langille is a Senior Lecturer at Arizona State University’s (ASU’s) School of Historical,
Philosophical and Religious Studies (SHPRS). His areas of expertise are Hebrew Bible,
Jewish history, genocide studies, and trauma and memory. He is on the board of directors
for both Genocide Awareness Week and the Phoenix Holocaust Association.

This paper explores the ‘muscle Jew’ and the biblical and Second Temple imagery invoked by the Jewish Legion (the 38th to 40th Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers), who fought on behalf of Britain during World War I. It examines the ways in which British Zionists and Jewish soldiers shaped the images of the muscle Jew through collective memories of Jewish antiquity, especially those of the Maccabees.

16. “There is No Place for the State in the Bedrooms of the Nation”: The Case of Québec’s Bill 21 [+–] 162-175

Jennifer Selby £17.50

Memorial University of Newfoundland

Jennifer A. Selby is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and affiliate member of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Her research, teaching, and supervision broadly consider Muslim life in contemporary France and Canada and the nature of secularism. She is the author of Questioning French Secularism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

What happens if we take Megan Goodwin’s argument that “Every piece of writing about religion offers a theory of what religion is and what it does” and substitute “secularism” for “religion”? And, how do theories of secularism necessarily relate to gender? This chapter problematizes Goodwin’s “religion/gender” theoretical lens in relation to 2019 legislation on secularism in Québec, Canada. Selby argues that Law 21’s ambiguity around acceptable religion in its focus on religious signs and narrow version of gender equality do a lot of work in delineating acceptable gender norms.

Part IV: Class and Economy

17. Regulating Religion to Maintain the Status Quo [+–] 179-186

Suzanne Owen £17.50

Leeds Trinity University

Suzanne Owen is an associate professor in the study of religion at Leeds Trinity University in the United Kingdom researching British Druidry and Indigeneity in Newfoundland.

This chapter explores through conceptualisations of hegemony and consent how the state regulation of religion supports the status quo and minimises dissent in the UK. Pagan groups’ attempts to gain public recognition reveals how state regulation operates today where ‘other’ religions are remodelled on and become second class versions of the religion of the ruling classes.

18. A Gramscian Inversion: Hegemony in Theory and in Practice [+–] 187-196

Thomas Carrico £17.50

Florida State University

Thomas J. Carrico, Jr. is a PhD candidate at Florida State University’s Department of Religion. Focusing on the matchstick industry in Victorian England, Carrico’s dissertation elucidates social, political, and economic constraints on moral reasoning, especially in response to industrial disease.

In this chapter, I argue against an Althusserian conception of ideology wherein a dominated group accepts the definitions and categories provided by a dominant group. Rather than viewing this as acceptance, I argue that dominated groups are not uniform, their consent may be strategic, and hegemonic unity is never as stable as it is often made to appear. Further, building on the work of James Scott, I argue that those in dominated groups tend to be very aware of these dynamics, even when they are portrayed as willing participants in hegemonic systems.

19. The Druid Network as a Capitalist Success Story: or, Why The Druid Network’s Charity Status is Beside the Point [+–] 197-203

Neil George £17.50

York University

Neil George is a doctoral candidate (ABD) in the Humanities at York University. His research focuses on discourses of science, religion, and the secular.

20. Who’s Afraid of Class Analysis? Rethinking Identity and Class in the Study of Religion [+–] 204-212

James Dennis LoRusso £17.50

Princeton University

James Dennis LoRusso is Associate Research Scholar for the Faith & Work Initiative in the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University. LoRusso is interested in Theories and Methods in the study of religion, the intersection of religion and business management thought and praxis, and the workplace as a site of production for the category of religion. He is the author of Spirituality, Corporate Culture, and American Business: The Neoliberal Ethic and The Spirit of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2017), which traces how “spiritual” discourses in business have have contributed to the establishment and continue to sustain neoliberal norms. In his current role, he is co-researcher for a mixed-methods study of corporate chaplaincy in US companies and is developing his next qualitative project, which will explore “faith-based” and interfaith employee networks in corporate America.

While Suzanne Owen’s analysis of neopaganism in the UK is illuminating, this chapter argues that it should not be considered class analysis in any meaningful way. She applies Gramsci’s conceptions of hegemony and consent to explain the struggles of neopagan communities for state recognition in the UK. However, in repurposing these concepts, Owen fundamentally changes them by imposing them on a set of social relations—religious discrimination and marginalization—quite distinct from Gramsci’s critique of class exploitation. This response contends that scholars must attend to the distinctions between these categories and considers a more fully developed sense of class analysis.

21. Definition, Comparison, Critique [+–] 213-219

Johan Strijdom £17.50

University of South Africa

Johan Strijdom is Professor of Comparative Religious Studies at the University of South Africa, Pretoria. In his research he focuses on religious nationalism and violence, critiques of indigenous religious claims and practices, and critical approaches to material mediations of religion. These areas are analyzed in a comparative and historically nuanced way, by elaborating a critique of class, gender and ethnic power relations from a postcolonial location in the global south. He is currently editor of the Journal for the Study of Religion, which is the official journal of the Association for the Study of Religion in Southern Africa.

This response suggests three ways that might enhance Owen’s contribution on the categories of class and economy, as she analyses hegemonies, normalization of hierarchies and subjugation of marginalized religious groups in the British state’s legal definition of religion in terms of charity. First, by relating definitions of religion in contemporary British law to those in imperial religious studies, and by defining and theorizing economy as suggested by Chidester. Secondly, by comparing the definition and function of religion in U.K. charity law with that in the U.S.A. or global South. Lastly, by clarifying whether her intention is to offer only a description of the normalization of hierarchies by the state, or also to take a normative stance against hegemonies, whether in the academy or in marginalized groups.

22. The Public Good Requirement [+–] 220-225

Suzanne Owen £17.50

Leeds Trinity University

Suzanne Owen is an associate professor in the study of religion at Leeds Trinity University in the United Kingdom researching British Druidry and Indigeneity in Newfoundland.

This response examines further how Gramsci’s work might have something to say about the hegemonic alliance of the state and the established church in the UK and explores the implications of regarding religion as ‘apolitical’ in that context.

End Matter

Index 227-239

Rebekka King FREE

Middle Tennessee State University

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Reviews

This book will be useful to scholars who want to think about how their own work could fit into conversations within religious studies and to consider that whatever their example, and whatever the scholar’s identity, their work might also be considered theoretical. In so doing I think that we as readers could take up the call of the book—in discussions in classrooms and at conferences—to imagine other futures beyond interrogating and dismantling hierarchies.
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Key Categories in the Study of Religion

Contexts and Critiques

Rebekka King [+–]

Middle Tennessee State University

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