Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
13. ‘Bad Religion’ on the University Campus: “Political Correctness” and the Future of the Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion
Hijacked - A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion - Leslie Dorrough Smith
Adrian Hermann [+]
University of Bonn
Stefan Priester [+]
Universität Bonn
Description
This anchoring essay of the university section discusses the “new campus religion” of “political correctness” as identified by mass-media commentators like William Deresiewicz and others. The authors analyse these current debates in light of the volume’s interest in the public rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, and focus on two things: first, the role played by the polemical use of ‘religion’ and adjacent terminologies in the descriptions of current protests; second, how an insider/outsider logic familiar to the study of religion seems to be at play in these controversies; Moving beyond this case study, the essay asks what the study of religion can learn in regard to the often discussed insider/outsider problem by drawing on feminist standpoint theory to better understand the epistemic effects of marginalization and oppression.