Against the Wind
September 30, 2025
Looking back now, I think that a choice that has long been common among scholars—e.g., what counts as authentic religion as opposed to an inauthentic cult—was what finally attracted my curiosity in grad school, after starting out in the philosophy of religion and taking courses on the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Kant’s First Critique, etc.; it was a selection process, I realized, that was driven by implicit criteria that, because they were usually not identified let alone defended, made them rather tough to critique but easy to assert. The distinction was presented as just so natural and obvious; no need to explain why someone’s a Lutheran but as for dissenters...? Now that needs accounting. And so, like Bob Seger once sang, I learned that there was much at stake in deciding “what to leave in, what to leave out”; asking about why and, importantly, how something came to be called and then treated as sacred (or not)—and by whom!—therefore struck me as a question worth pursuing.
That was in the backdrop of much of my early writing, I’d say—I think here of Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 1997) as well as the essays, dating from the mid- to later-1990s, that came out as Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (State University of New York Press, 2001—a phrase that I borrowed from Burton Mack). For whatever reason—perhaps because I looked at the field itself or maybe, as a young scholar, because I named names of my much respected seniors—these books caught people’s attention; in many cases they were resoundingly criticized. I think of the anonymous review of my first book, published in The Christian Century of all places, whose incredulous asides summed it up nicely: “The author … belongs to a company of scholars who argue—get this! one is tempted to say—that the majority of religious studies teachers and writers are too devoted to the truth claims of religion… [T]he claims and practices of religious studies scholars demands scrutiny. But he has loaded his analysis with ideology and he writes mean-spiritedly” (115/5: 187 1998). (I convinced the press to use that very quote as a blurb to promote the second edition of the book, due out early in 2026, since I tend to think that I’d not be doing my job correctly if my work was greeted in any other way at such a site.) Because I’ve just produced new editions of both of those books—works that many still disagree with but which, again for some reason, continue to appear on doctoral exam reading lists—I’ve been doing some thinking about revisiting texts that are now 30 years old, or more—which would make them relics in any other field. But in surveying the current landscape it seemed to me that updated versions would, unfortunately, still be relevant.
Sure, not many scholars today explicitly assert that religion is sui generis; but many still presume that those things known as religions are somehow privileged and therefore require special interpretive (and thus largely not explanatory) analysis and, sooner or later, rightly deserve some sort of conservation and maybe even appreciation on our part: the discourse on sui generis religion by other means. Sure, many now agree that the word “religion” has a local history but what it names seems to float free of that—a rose by any other name and all that. For example, consider the new edition of Critical Terms for Religious Studies, where the editor’s introduction makes plain that, as so many others have also phrased it, “religions are embedded and shaped by material, social, economic and political realities” (2025: 2; emphasis added). The distance is negligible between that and Mircea Eliade’s once well-known claim, as phrased in the foreword to his Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), that “[b]ecause religion is human it must for that reason be something social, something linguistic, something economic—you cannot think of man [sic] apart from language and society.” Of course, the other shoe hit the ground immediately in his case: “But it would be hopeless to try to explain religion in terms of any one of these basic functions.” It’s all curiously akin to what I take as Paul Bramadat’s position in his recent and, for some, already much celebrated book Yogalands: In Search of Practice on the Mat and in the World (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025): recognizing that his own and others’ yoga practice is probably “shaped by social, economic, psychological, ethnoracial, or ideological interests and biases” he concludes that these influences and shaping forces, as he calls them there, play a role, certainly, but do not capture it all. For, as he goes on: “I am just not convinced that the spiritual, religious, or mystical experiences that I have heard about, witnessed, and had myself are entirely reducible to facts” (2025: 200). Voila: shaped? Yes, indeed; but caused by those very conditions? Definitely not.
I know Paul a bit, as I do some of the contributors to the new edition of Chicago’s Critical Terms (a volume whose approach, I might add here, invites comparison to the two 50-word volumes that Aaron Hughes and I wrote just a few years ago); many of them are very nice people, to be sure. So, if you’re wanting to make my disagreement dramatic by hyping it as personal or, I don’t know, an aggressive attack (as Theodore Ludwig, a Chicago alum whose world religions textbook I once assessed critically, described Manufacturing Religion in his 1998 review), then I’d caution against it. Instead of offering dismissive moves that protect the status quo— (like the time a senior scholar condescendingly likened my much earlier self, in the pages of JAAR, to a tiresome little puppy who’d learned a new trick) maybe today there are a few more who are willing to push back against those who continue to claim that there’s a mysterious “Je ne sais quoi” that must be felt to be understood—that’s the wind that we’re still running against. Thus, I do indeed think that the old work remains relevant today but, sadly so, since it signals that not much has changed in all of these years—sure, we talk about embodiment and material religion today but, in my reading, many of the so-called new approaches, new questions, and new insights, as the new Critical Terms opening phrases it, are just a thinly veiled retooling of classic phenomenology of religion. Whether it’s called mana or meaning, the holy or the human spirit, it indicates an inertia that makes this old work still relevant.
So, thinking back to that guy fresh out of a PhD program and in a year-to-year instructor’s position at the University of Tennessee—the one who had just sent his first book off to the press and who had no idea that a career in US public higher ed was indeed in his future let alone that he, the one accused so often back then of trying to kill off the field, would one day be hired as a chair to try to revive a struggling department in the south—I’d probably want to assure him that he certainly won’t change a lot of minds and that, at least for some, his entire career would amount to a bit of a burr under the field’s saddle. But I’d also tell him, just as I think that he once hoped, that the same work would represent, for yet others, at least one way that it all could be done otherwise at a time when alternatives were badly in need. And as for that department reinvention that he’d one day take on…, you know, I’d like to tell him that, despite all of the challenges, it would go surprisingly well, but having access to that info in advance might risk losing the fire in the belly that’s always handy in getting through such situations—a fire that we all need right now, in fact, since, whether we like it or not, we’ve all been blessed to live in interesting times, as that old toast phrased what we know also amounts to a curse.