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How Not to Be a Religion

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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Christianity, instead of by the only thing that could possibly save us, the anguish and the love of God…. A Christian who takes God seriously must surely recognize that God does not give a fig for Christianity.25

Fetishizing is this transference of religious energies from objects of devotion—God, the Buddha, or the Torah—to the religion itself. If what saves is not God but assent to a certain set of propositions about God, then the religion that alone offers those propositions can become the object of such devotion.

Time does not permit a detailed explication of the toxic potentialities of these features of religionization. For now, I suggest only that religions as so constituted serve to generate brittle and rigid conceptions of exclusive identity and allegiance. When such religions become themselves the object of devotion and then politicized, they can unleash disruptive and antipluralistic energies into public space that are difficult to call back and to constrain.

Dereligionizing Traditions If we are to enter into a robust postsecular moment, one that might give rise to a new postsecular politics marked not only by tolerance but also by a rich ethos of engagement between religious traditions and between nontheists and the religious, then we must do more than generate new conceptions of public life in which religious voices can once again be political actors. That task is necessary but insufficient. We must also forthrightly ask, “What risks (p.63) obtain when religions, as configured during modernity, are now politicized?” Can persons who belong to these often rigid and brittle configurations bring into the public sphere capacities for engaging in political life with charity and generosity? I fear that politicization without dereligionization is a risky proposition.

So dereligionize we must, because the markers described above serve to introduce toxic elements into political life. Theologians and their analogs within the religions—and here I speak of “religions” because virtually all our are traditions have become religionized to some extent just as our bodies have become raced as the fiction of race has been inscribed upon our skins— must take up the labor of dereligionizing our traditions in order to open up pluralist possibilities and to deepen spiritual life. Again, W. C. Smith puts the matter with compelling power: “A task of the modern religious reformer is to help men [sic] not to let their religion stand between them and God.”26 In addition to Smith’s task, we might add that modern religious reformers also have an obligation not to let religions stand between adherents and their neighbors who are not coreligionists.

The work of detextualization begins by recalling that the relative importance of texts to religious life has been exaggerated during modernity. Texts have, of necessity, always mattered more to literate elites than to the vast nonliterate majority of any tradition’s adherents. Even when texts enjoy reverence and prominence within traditions, for most, access to those texts has come by way of artistic depiction and dramatic performance. Of course, the text as depicted and performed is recognizable as text interpreted: The motile character of the text is more readily apparent when it is danced and sung than when it remains fixed on the printed page. Those who seek to detextualize a tradition must work to bring attention to ritual, aesthetics, contemplation, and ethical action, which have all been overshadowed by the bright and singular light cast on scripture. Any tradition’s capacity to shape the affective and practical orientation of human beings rests precisely on these now neglected dimensions of religious traditions.

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A second component of that labor is the work of deliteralization. Theologians within traditions must work to show that religious texts have not always been read literally. Our traditions contain vast treasuries of reading practices that have become marginalized in modernity. The recovery of these ancient modalities of reading religious texts can offer a corrective to conceptions of literal truth and inerrancy that impoverish the creative multiplicity inherent within any religious tradition.27 The attenuation of the polydox character of traditions makes it far easier to generate facile oppositions between religions. By marginalizing or even removing from collective consciousness features of one’s own traditions that richly overlap with features of other traditions, we (p.64) become increasingly incapable of recognizing ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves. Literal readings that remove from vision mystical interpretations of Christian scriptures, for example, can serve to undergird dichotomies between the rational and historical West and the mystical and ahistorical East. So many elements within traditions must be rendered marginal or even invisible before such fictive oppositions can seem plausible.

To dereify a tradition is to situate it within a larger social and historical matrix that would permit us to see it as constituted by its interactions—with other traditions, with critics and opponents, and with larger political and economic flows. To dereify a tradition is also to attend to persons who inherit and in turn transform traditions and thereby to recognize their intrinsic mutability. Also, attention to persons will demonstrate that they are almost always shaped by more than one tradition at a time and have been so for most of human history and in most geographical locations. To recognize traditions as porous, everchanging, and internally multiple is to give up on fictitious representations of religious traditions as immutable or possessed of essential features always and everywhere the same. Such recognition also frees persons to recognize their own indebtedness to more than one tradition. To remove from vision our own and our community’s internal multiplicity is to generate the conditions under which antagonisms can flourish.

To defetishize a tradition is to remove the conditions under which traditions themselves become the objects of religious devotion. Human beings are historical creatures, creatures of context and culture; appreciation of this truth has become commonplace thanks to the work of Herder, Troeltsch, and others. If knowledge of ultimate reality or the real as such is to be had, it will be had only by means of thick instrumentalities made possible by religious traditions. Even traditions that hold to the possibility of unmediated encounter with ultimate reality understand themselves to be custodians of just those practices that make such encounter possible. Hence, reverence for tradition is indispensable to religious life.

But such reverence need not amount to fetishization. Religious traditions must be understood as complex sign systems and networks of practices that enable persons to rightly engage the relevant features of ultimate reality.28 They are not themselves that ultimate reality and so are unworthy of idolatrous attachment. They are means to an end and not that end itself. Making that truth plain to adherents is a central task for theologians and religious teachers if adherents are to participate in the public square as articulate and passionate but also generous, self- critical, and humble advocates of the traditions to which they belong.

The marks of religionization are problematic and even potentially toxic because, taken collectively, they tend to generate inflexible identity configurations. (p.65) First, what it means to be part of any tradition is impoverished when that tradition is homogenized and its internal diversity domesticated by creedalization and literalization. Second, reification obscures from view the extent to which all our traditions are fluid and porous, thereby preventing an

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appreciation of the truth of our multiplicity, that all of us have been and continue to be shaped by resources from more than religion narrowly construed. Finally, fetishization binds persons to traditions in such a fashion that no critical distance from one’s tradition seems possible; belonging to a religion makes an exhaustive and final claim to one’s loyalty and allegiance. It no longer seems possible to entertain the notion that all our traditions are provisional, contestable, and subject to constant transformation. The notion that we have much to learn from other religions seems hardly intelligible. How can persons and communities bearing such constricted identities be generous participants in pluralistic public life?

Even religious life itself is impoverished when traditions are reduced to religions. Central to the various religious traditions are projects that call into question virtually every conventional mode of identity, including religious identity, in the face of mystery. Dare we say that authentic religious life is imperiled by traditions when they become religions? Hence, the project of dereligionization, which seeks to undo these markers, is an urgent matter for both public life and for the intrinsic aims of religious life itself.

Unbinding Identity: Ontological Wonder and the Labor of Self-Cultivation A core component in the labor of dereligionizing traditions is the recovery of practice, broadly construed. By practice, I mean to include what now falls under the headings of ritual and spiritual discipline. In my own idiom, I prefer to speak of therapeutic regimens, which serve to comport bodies—personal and social—to the world as rightly interpreted. On my account, to be religious is to seek comprehensive qualitative orientation. Here, I make a transhistorical claim that human beings seek orientation to the whole of things or reality as such rightly understood.29

They seek that orientation by means of interpretive schemes by which some conception of the real is derived.

But orientation is not accomplished by generating interpretive schemes alone. Qualitative orientation requires proper comportment to reality as understood by means of interpretive schemes. What dispositions should we cultivate in ourselves given what we take reality to be? Therapeutic regimens are the means by which persons and communities are rightly comported to reality rightly understood. To speak of qualitative orientation is to specify that the labor of orientation and comportment is richly affective in character and not merely a matter of propositional knowing. Qualitative orientation is not (p.66) accomplished merely by having in mind a set of propositions to which one gives cognitive assent. Qualitative orientation is erotic labor, a work of determining what is worthy of desire and then tutoring the heart so that unworthy desires are relinquished and authentic ones embraced. Therapeutic regimens are how traditions seek to accomplish this work of right orientation through comportment.

The religionization of our traditions has led to the relative marginalization of therapeutic regimens that were once a robust and integral part of traditions before they became religions. I would venture to assert that we have nonetheless given ourselves over to other therapeutic regimens by means of which our bodies are comported to the real as understood within modernity, broadly speaking. Thus, the state commends and even compels bodies to adopt a host of rituals (devotion to a flag, for example) and spiritual disciplines by which bodies learn to defer to state power and become bearers of patriotic dispositions. Likewise, therapeutic regimens of production and consumption serve to discipline bodies and comport them to the demands of the market. The cumulative force of these therapeutic regimens inscribes in our mind-body

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complexes prescribed identities that teach us how to be citizens and consumers within particular kinds of local and global configurations.

Other possibilities, that is to say other therapeutic regimens, are offered by religious traditions— regimens that are meant to evoke and sustain modes of ontological wonder without which human beings fail to be properly oriented to reality as rightly understood by the traditions in question. To evoke and be imbued by these varieties of ontological wonder is to be properly oriented to deep features of reality as such. But in order to be so oriented, conventional configurations of self hood and identity must be contested and transformed. That is, configurations of self hood as ordinarily understood must be deconstructed and reconfigured if human beings are to be awakened to and rooted in the kinds of ontological wonder that traditions seek to cultivate in their adherents.

In other writing, I have spoken of three kinds of ontological wonder that I correlate with a certain trinitarian configuration.30 I then proceed to show that various religious traditions also show themselves to be open to and even claimed by these modes of ontological wonder. Although no set of terms is adequate to capture precisely what I mean, I nonetheless speak of the wonder that anything is at all, wonder that anything that is is contingent, and that anything whatsoever is what it is by virtue of being related to all other things. I then correlate these three kinds of ontological wonder to dimensions in the divine life, namely, ground, contingency, and relation.

No extended explication of this double threefold is possible herein. I will give only the briefest hints about what I have in mind because my primary (p.67) purpose is not to sketch out a theological ontology but to suggest that religious orientation at this ontological level serves to challenge, disrupt, and reconfigure conventional investment in reified identities. Even or perhaps especially “religious identities” are challenged by these ontological awakenings as each, in its own way, serves to unearth an apophatic dimension that undoes every conventional identity configuration by means of which we navigate mundane life.

The first sort of ontological wonder is the wonder that there is anything at all. The sheer mystery of being, that there is something rather than nothing, the mystery that to any given in experience we can say it is, rather than it is not. The various religious traditions give a host of explanations for this primary ontological given. Not all traditions or strands of traditions are equally open to and committed to cultivating in adherents a sense of the mystery of the sheer being of things. Advaita Vedanta, in particular, is committed to cultivating an awareness of being as such (sat) and then proceeds to claim that this sheer being is Brahman. Moreover, to say that we just are being understood as Brahman is not to be able to say what being is. We can say only that it is that without which nothing would be, but it is not itself a discrete and knowable something. That which grounds and just is our very being is nameless mystery (nirguna brahman). The ontological wonder about the sheer being of things is taken to point to ultimate reality itself, Brahman, which is the ground and substance of all things.

A second kind of ontological wonder is aroused not by the sheer being of things but by awareness that each given, each experienced “thing,” is contingent and singular. Any thing considered as a discrete particular is colored by its “might/need not have been and will not be but now is” character. Still more, each given in experience is marked by utter singularity: No leaf is identical to another, and no arch of an eyebrow traces out the same arc as any other. I believe that this is in part what Connolly means when he speaks about the fecundity of being.31

When religious traditions speak to, account for, and sustain in devotees a sense of contingency,

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some variety of the doctrine of creation customarily comes into play. Theists appeal to God as the creator of every contingent thing, the whence of the wondrous world of exuberant diversity. A nontheist may speak instead of immanent creativity that gives rise to a contingent world without positing a noncontingent creator, but both can recognize and share a sense of ontological wonder at the sheer fact of contingency.

A third and final sense of ontological wonder is evoked by the intuition that not one of the aforementioned contingent realities is what it is apart from its relationships. To be is to be related. Any thing deeply considered shows itself to be intimately related to every other thing. Indeed, some religious traditions suggest that the very idea that reality is made up things at all is a mistake (p.68) inasmuch as that intuition artificially separates a notional object of reflection, identified for some conventional purpose, into an object as such. This claim is the most rigorous refusal of reification imaginable. There are no things anywhere to be found but only nodes in a network of inexhaustible relationality. Here, I have in mind in Madhyamaka tradition as well as the Hua-Yen tradition, both part of the larger canopy of Mahayana Buddhism.

I cannot here narrate how I move, as a Christian trinitarian, from sheer being, contingent being, and relationality to three dimensions of the divine life, namely God as ground/abyss (grund and ungrund), God as (source of) contingency, and God as relation. I leave it to readers to note that my double threefold correlates well with certain conceptions of God as Father, Son/Lo-gos, and Spirit. The point of this highly compressed theological ontology is to suggest that religious traditions seek to draw persons into right orientation to reality as such by awakening and sustaining in persons these ontological intuitions by way of therapeutic regimens that open persons onto these vistas. Although persons may unbidden trip and fall into such ontological intuitions and be awakened briefly to these modes of wonder, commitment to therapeutic regimens is necessary if one is to abide in and be guided by these intuitions. The Advaita Vedantin practitioner must undertake practices that diminish attachment to caste identity in order to awaken to his or her true identity as unknowable Brahman. That ascesis may be rigorous, initially disorienting, and even painful, but the result is a nondual compassion that grows from the knowledge that you and I are not-two. As ordinary identity is disrupted and another identity takes its place, one’s ethical disposition is transformed and the exclusiveness of caste identity is called into question.

To be awakened in Christian experience to the contingency and singularity of each being is to know every other as a site of value. Awakening to the singularity of each thing is the ground of an authentic eros, for recognition of the desirability of each particular in its nonsubstitutability. This kind of desire is different from the Advaitin’s compassion rooted in the sense that you and I are not-two, that ultimately, we are both Brahman. Hence, Advaita compassion and Christian eros/agape (eros without the desire to possess the particular for one’s own is agape—hence, eros and agape should not be dichotomized) are not the same.

To awaken to and be rooted in an appreciation for the truth that I am not I without you, that nothing at all exists apart from relation—that too awakens in me a mode of compassion that is both like but different in texture to the Advaita understanding of compassion. On Buddhist accounts, you and I are not the same by virtue of both being Brahman, but I am not I without you, and hence, I would labor under profound ignorance if I sought my private welfare at your expense. I must, therefore, undertake a therapeutic regimen (p.69) that diminishes my egoism in order to replace egoism with nonduality and compassion.

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These three sites of ontological wonder, and the strands of the religious traditions that I have hastily sketched, suggest that our identities are never securely knowable because they open up into the mystery of being-itself, because they are marked by contingency and singularity, and because they are through and through constituted by an open-ended network of relationality. Moreover, I suspect that naturalists and theists can also recognize these sites of ontological wonder as sacred. Attending to these ontological mysteries that elicit wonder can open up ways of being together that honor difference. Connolly is right to suggest that only such recursive labor—the labor of working on ourselves so that we come to see what we could not otherwise— can help us appreciate that there is more to human beings than our conventional identities.32

These conventional identities, including religious identities, must not be reified and fetishized because our traditions are meant precisely to contest impoverished convictions about who and what we are.

When we understand these dimensions of religious traditions and commit to therapeutic regimens that are other than and even opposed to the therapeutic regimens of state formations and market forces, we inhabit our traditions otherwise than as “religions” narrowly understood. To so inhabit our traditions holds both promise and peril for state and market. Insofar as the therapeutic regimens of religious traditions challenge attachment to conventional identities as absolutized, as idolatrous objects of devotion, therapeutic regimens that awaken us to capacious understandings of self hood open up pluralist possibilities in public life. These pluralistic sensibilities can help sustain polities that can withstand the shearing pressures behind the impulse to demonize those whom we take to be other, those whom we exclude from status and voice in the body politic. But insofar as these therapeutic regimens challenge and interrupt what the state and the market have to offer, religious traditions counter and threaten the hegemonic claims of these institutions to shape our lives without remainder. Dereligionized traditions are anything but domesticated traditions.

Notes

(1.) John Milbank’s magisterial Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990).

(2.) William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

(3.) ibid., 137–61.

(4.) Leora Batnitzky’s important book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

(5.) On care of the self, see Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 86–89. See also the work of Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995). Hadot mobilizes the expression “spiritual exercises” for the recursive work of self-cultivation. See 81–109.

(6.) Richard Gombrich’s and Gananath Obeyesekere’s important discussion of the modern laicization of meditation in Sri Lanka in their book, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 237–40.

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The popularization of meditation on the American scene might also challenge the claim I make about the marginalization of therapeutic regimen, and yet might not the same case be made here as with Sri Lanka? Is it not the case that here too meditation and other disciplines like yoga are routinely severed from the soterio-logical purposes at the heart of religious traditions? Perhaps that is why such practices seem more popular among those who claim not to be religious but spiritual. Indeed, the very intelligibility of the distinction rests on the notion that spiritual disciplines are external to and other than what stands at the heart of the religious.

(7.) See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991; originally published by Macmillan, 1962); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

(8.) Arvind-Pal S. Mandair and Markus Dressler, “Introduction: Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Post-Secular,” in Secularism and Religion-Making, ed. Dressler and Mandair (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.

(9.) Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 44.

(10.) See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (New York: Routledge, 1999); Timothy Fitzgerald, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity: A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

(11.) A note of clarification: I myself am prepared, like W. C. Smith, to talk about a religious dimension to human experience. I am even willing to run the risk of stipulating that this dimension is universally present. However, I insist that what I am designating as “the religious” is broadly dispersed throughout a whole range of cultural activities. I read Western modernity— speaking simplistically here as though there is but a single modernity—as an unsuccessful attempt to distill and confine the “religious” into a discrete sphere or province of life as opposed to the secular and then to organize the traditions so confined into “religions.” See more on my conception of the religious in the final section of this chapter.

(12.) Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

(13.) Ibid., 1.

(14.) ibid., 8

(15.) I will add further specifications below.

(16.) William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

(17.) On this matter, see the discussion of Smith on reification below.

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(18.) That the modern invention of religion brings with it new problems that make religions especially vulnerable to violence when politicized does not require making the claim that prior to modernity the traditions were innocent. One does not have to make such claims in order to discern new dangers.

(19.) Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 61–73.

(20.) chapter 3“Sacred Texts, Hermeneutics and World Religions” in King, Orientalism and Religion, 62–81.

(21.) Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

(22.) “Myth and Metaphysics: Perils of the Metaphysical Translation of Mythic Images,” in Harold Oliver, Metaphysics, Theology, and Self: Relational Essays (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2006), 33–38.

(23.) For a fascinating conversation, which demonstrates just how constricted conceptions of truth—in this case a certain kind of Christian claim that a statement is true only if it describes a historical occurrence—function in cross-cultural encounter, see King, Orientalism and Religion, 39–41. King narrates an exchange between a Western anthropologist and a “young Balinese,” who makes an important distinction concerning the story of Prince Rama: “‘What is it that you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to know whether the story is true, or merely whether it occurred?’” (39). In this particular case, Western conceptions of truth are resisted; in others, they are all too readily embraced.

(24.) See, for example, Stephen Prothero’s fine work on Henry Steel Olcott, America’s first convert to Buddhism and his role in the creation of a Protestant Buddhism including a Buddhist catechism, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). For a copy of that catechism itself, see Olcott, “The Buddhist Catechism [1908],” Internet Sacred Text Archive (2010), http://www.sacred-texts.com/bud//tbc/index.htm.

(25.) Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 127.

(26.) Ibid.

(27.) Andrew Louth’s fine work in Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Wichita, Kans.: Eighth Day Books, 2007), 96–131.

(28.) Robert Neville’s On the Scope and Truth of Theology: Theology as Symbolic Engagement (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006).

(29.) To be clear, “religion” is a historically variable and provisional configuration; the religious impulse is not. Moreover, the attempt to corral the religious into the religions has never and can never succeed. Religiousness is a pervasive and fugitive impulse that resists attempts at containment.

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(30.) John Thatamanil, “God as Ground, Contingency, and Relation: Trinitarian Polydoxy and Religious Diversity,” in Polydoxy: Theology of Multiplicity and Relation, ed. Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider (New York: Routledge, 2011), 238–57.

(31.) A World of Becoming (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 72.

(32.) For Connolly on the need for self-cultivation and even “spirituality,” see World of Becoming, 68–92.

Notes: (1.) John Milbank’s magisterial Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990).

(2.) William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

(3.) ibid., 137–61.

(4.) Leora Batnitzky’s important book, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

(9.) Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 44.

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(12.) Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

(13.) Ibid., 1.

(14.) ibid., 8

(15.) I will add further specifications below.

(16.) William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

(17.) On this matter, see the discussion of Smith on reification below.

(19.) Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 61–73.

(20.) chapter 3“Sacred Texts, Hermeneutics and World Religions” in King, Orientalism and Religion, 62–81.

(21.) Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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who makes an important distinction concerning the story of Prince Rama: “‘What is it that you want to know?’ he asked. ‘Do you want to know whether the story is true, or merely whether it occurred?’” (39). In this particular case, Western conceptions of truth are resisted; in others, they are all too readily embraced.

(25.) Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 127.

(26.) Ibid.

(27.) Andrew Louth’s fine work in Discerning the Mystery: An Essay on the Nature of Theology (Wichita, Kans.: Eighth Day Books, 2007), 96–131.

(28.) Robert Neville’s On the Scope and Truth of Theology: Theology as Symbolic Engagement (New York: T&T Clark International, 2006).

(31.) A World of Becoming (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 72.

(32.) For Connolly on the need for self-cultivation and even “spirituality,” see World of Becoming, 68–92.