Is Christianity A Religion? A Rough Excerpt From My Book
On occasion, one hears theologians argue that Christianity is not a religion. Karl Barth, as a particularly powerful example, enthusiastically declared that Christianity was not only not a religion, but called all human religions into question. During the Enlightenment, says Barth, a “catastrophe” occurred where “in the movement of so-called rational orthodoxy at the beginning of the eighteenth century … dogmatics [began] quite openly and unilaterally … with the presupposition of the concept and the description of a general and natural and neutral ‘religion.’”[1] With this statement Barth’s quarrel with Friedrich Schleiermacher, always lingering in the background of his work, becomes particularly important to note. For Schleiermacher, with his On Religion: Speeches To Its Cultured Despisers, was one of the first thinkers to pontificate on the nature of “religion” per se.
To some, perhaps, Barth’s concern will ring as irredeemably novel, modern, corrupt. And yet, St. Augustine very early on voiced a similar concern regarding “religion”:
The word ‘religion’ [religio] might seem to express more definitely the worship due to God alone, and therefore Latin translators have used the word to represent [the Greek term, used for example in James 1:27] threskeia. Yet, as not only the uneducated, but also the best instructed, use the word religion to express human ties, and relationships, and affinities, it would inevitably produce ambiguities to use this word in discussing the worship of God, without contradicting the common usage, which applies this word to the observance of social relationships.[2]
Humorously, the second-century B.C. Roman playwright Plautus provides an example ready to hand: religio is here meant to convey a sense of reserve, a sort of social filter that bends the will to propriety. One can almost hear Plautus roll his eyes when he describes an invitation to a dinner part: revocat me ilico, vocat me ad cenam; religio fuit, denegare nolui” or, in English: “He calls me back directly and invites me to dinner. I had scruples [religio fuit], I could not decline.” “For much of the last two centuries,” writes Brent Nongbri, “both popular and academic thought has assumed that religion is a universal human phenomenon, a part of the ‘natural’ human experience that is essentially the same across cultures throughout history.” To be sure, individual expressions may vary, colored as they are by local custom, community, and ceremony. Nevertheless, “there is [assumed to be] an element that we call religion to be found in all cultures in all time periods.”[3]Yet, as Nongbri continues:
During the past thirty years, this picture [of religion as a universal category] has been increasingly criticized by experts in various academic fields. They have observed … that terms and concepts corresponding to religion do not appear in non-Western cultures until after those cultures first encountered European Christians. … More generally, it has become clear that the isolation of something called ‘religion’ as a sphere of life ideally separated from politics, economics, and science is not a universal feature of human history. …[T]he act of distinguishing between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ [for example] is a recent development. Ancient people simply did not carve up the world that way.[4]
This produces the conclusion that “religion” is not, in fact, a natural category. “As a field of knowledge, academic discipline, or branch of science,” writes Daniel Dubuisson, “the history of religions is itself a historical phenomenon.” This means that “[the concept of religion] appeared at a precise time—the second half of the nineteenth century—and a precise place—western Europe.”[5]
The first scholar to make a sustained historiographical argument along these lines was Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his classic 1962 work,The Meaning and End of Religion.[6]Startlingly, regarding the entire discipline of comparative religion, to say nothing of the “scientific” study of the category, Smith insists “an argument can be made that the entire enterprise is impossible or illegitimate.”[7]Given that he was writing in the 1960’s, during the heyday of “death of God” theologies, and the apex of the so-called “secularization thesis,” one might initially harbor the suspicion that Smith is merely reproducing an earlier argument made by those like Franz Overbeck, Ludwig Feuerbach, or Karl Marx (to name but a few), who note in various ways that “religion” or “theology” are merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental human reality. To study “religion”, therefore, would be nonsensical as other, more “fundamental” disciplines like biology, anthropology, psychology, or sociology would be better up to the task.
Smith, however, starts with a rather more prosaic methodological trajectory (though perhaps with similarly far-reaching implications): “To understand the world, and ourselves, it is helpful if we become critical of the terms and concepts we are using. Further, to understand other people and other ages, it is requisite that we do not presume uncritically that their meanings for words are the same as ours.”[8]As such, “We must be alert, lest out of casualness or lack of historical perception, we fail to notice changes in word usage that may be quite significant, so that we read back into the past what are actually our own innovations.”[9]Noting the notorious plurality of attempted definitions of “religion” by scholars, Smith suspects that “the term should be dropped.” In order to substantiate this somewhat unsettling claim, Smith turns to investigate what he frames as “a long range development [in the West], what we may term a process of reification: mentally making religion into a thing, gradually coming to conceive it as an objective, systematic entity.”[10]
This has not gone uncontested, of course. Even a few scholars who follow Smith’s trajectory want to nuance it. Talal Asad, who was one of the earliest figures along with Edward Said and Michel Foucault to really lean into Smith’s suggestion regarding the deconstruction of the category of religion, is less concerned than Smith about the “reification” of religion as a coherent “something.”[11]Rather, Asad notes the deleterious effects Smith notices are due more to the fact that “’religion’ is a modern concept not because it is reified,” but rather “because it has been linked to its Siamese twin ‘secularism.’” Asad continues: “Religion has been part of the restructuration of practical times and spaces, a rearticulation of practical knowledges and powers, of subjective behaviors, sensibilities, needs, and expectations in modernity.” But the key to Asad’s revision of Smith is that “[these insights] appl[y] equally to secularism, whose function has been to try and guide that rearticulation and to define ‘religions’ in the plural as a species of (non-rational) belief. … Secularist ideology, I would suggest, tries to fix permanently social and political place of ‘religion.’”[12]
Tomoko Masuzawa, speaking in particular of our ability to denote “world religions,” is less immediately sanguine about our ability to preciselypinpoint the emergence of the concept: “Today, we understand the term ‘world religions’ to be more or less equivalent to ‘religions of the world’ … but the history of its usage in this general sense, in any typographic variation … is vexingly obscure. It is not immediately obvious when the term came into use, or in what sense.” She continues, noting that this is in itself a clue that some prior transformation had occurred precisely because “’world religions’ makes its appearance [in the twentieth century] without ceremony, without explanation, and seemingly without a history.”[13]But just because of such suddenness, as Dubuisson also acknowledges, “This manner of proceeding, so habitual as to no longer cause surprise, is naïve and often driven by ulterior motives that have little to do with science.”[14]
The changing language marks a critical difference. This shift in meaning seems to represent the vanishing of God, and words like transcendent, infinite, or sacredare attempts to cover for an absence, to describe a shadow. Yet the very category of ‘religion’ was formulated around a Christian concept of God. In talking and writing about religion, it is often mistakenly assumed that religions have a common hidden essence that marks them as ‘religious.’ In excluding God from its explanatory apparatus, ‘religion’ remains as a category structured around a hole or a fissure. In other words, we find ourselves in a discipline organized around a core that no longer exists and we cannot in conscience reconstruct.[19]Josephson-Storm continues, and in this way that the rise of “religious studies” very often explicitly “represented [itself] as a self-conscious reaction to theology from which it differentiates itself in the same moment that it is relying on a Protestant conception of religion itself.”[20]Ironically then, the rise of “religious studies,” which are undertaken in ostensible “scientific” fairness to the phenomena under investigation, developed as an explicit tactic to sequester and so marginalize the very domains supposedly being elevated in these courses of inquiry. For Smith—himself a Christian—though there was nothing purely “arbitrary or grotesque”[21] nor “arbitrary or absurd,”[22]with the arrival of “religion” as the category we recognize and reflexively use today, nonetheless with the category there also came a discernable loss (and not just for Christianity): “the rise of the concept ‘religion’” he says, “is in some ways correlated with a decline in the practice of religion itself.”[23]
That this is so, is because the category represents not an advance but a retreat: “religious traditions that were once in practice and are still perhaps in ideal coterminous with human life in all its comprehensiveness … seem to [now merely] be one facet of a person’s life alongside many others.”[24]Smith is not coy about this:
It is as Christians’ faith in God has weakened that they have busied themselves with Christianity; and as their personal relation to Christ has virtually lapsed that they have turned to religion for solace. The notion that 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. On 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 Christianity, instead of by the only thing that could possibly save us, by the anguish and love of God.[25]
As such, we can take our thesis from an observation of Tomoko Masuzawa: “When religion came to be identified as such—that is, in more or less in the same sense that we think of it today—it came to be recognized above all as something that, in the opinions of many self-consciously modern Europeans, was in the process of disappearing from their midst, or if not altogether disappearing, becoming circumscribed in such a way that it was finally discernible as a distinct, limited phenomenon.”[26]
This is linked to many historical forces. As examples, JasonĀ. Josephson (now Josephson-Storm) notes in his The Invention of Religion in Japan, when the Japanese first encountered the western term “religion” they had no idea what it meant. No word, no concept existed in the Japanese language that approximated what was indicated by the term. Rather, “the [Western] defining of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary drawing exercise that extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto.”[27]
Because of the pervasive use of the word religion in the cultures of the modern western world (the “we” here) we already intuitively know what religion is before we even try to define it: religion is anything sufficiently resembling modern Protestant Christianity…Most of the debates about whether or not this “ism” (Confucianism, Marxism, etc…) is reallya religion boils down to the question of whether or not they are sufficiently similar to modern Protestant Christianity.[28]
Yet, Christianity itself underwent a major transformation before this projection could take place. For the early and medieval church, “religion” was not a genus of which there were multiple species—say, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on. Rather, “religion” was associated not with discrete belief systems, but with a sliding scale of proper or improper worship and virtue. As Jason Josephson-Storm notes, for example:
…in the late Middle Ages, during which a number of European scholars began to argue that there were various subtypes of the greater religion, which they divided into classifications Christianity, ‘Mahomateanism [sic],’ Judaism, and idolatry (or paganism). But in its original formulation this list should not be mistaken for a list of four religions. It described one ‘right’ way of relating to God (Christianity) and different types of false [or deficient] worship.[29]
[1]Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, 288.
[2]St. Augustine, City of God trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), X.3 (p.304f).
[3]Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 1.
[4]Ibid., 1-2.
[5]Daniel Dubuisson,The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology trans. William Sayers (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 2.
[6]Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1962).
[7]Ibid., 5.
[8]Ibid.,16.
[9]Ibid., 17.
[10]Ibid., 5.
[11]Talal Asad, “Reading A Modern Classic: W.C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion,” History of Religions40 (2001): 205-222.
[12]Ibid., 221.
[13]Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 10.
[14]Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, 22.
[15]Mircea Eliade, “The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912 and After,” in The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 12-26.
[16]Michael J. Buckley, S.J., “The Study of Religion and the Rise of Atheism: Conflict or Confirmation?” in David F. Ford, Ben Quash, and Janet Martin Soskice, eds., Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3-25. Quote at 4.
[17]Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy(New York, Oxford University Press, 1958).
[18]Wolfhart Pannenberg Systematic Theology trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publising 1991), 1:140.
[19]Jason Ā Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 121.
[20]Ibid.,94.
[21]Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, 121.
[22]Ibid., 124.
[23]Ibid., 19.
[24]Ibid., 124.
[25]Ibid., 127.
[26]Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 18.
[27]Jason Ā Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.
[28]Nongbri, Before Religion,18.
[29]Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan, 15-16.
[30]See for example: Darius Karlowicz, Socrates and Other Saints: Early Christian Understandings of Reason and Philosophy,trans. Artur Sebastian Rosman (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2017).
[31]Harrison, Territories, 101.
[32]Ibid., 102.
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