Essay: Is there any value to the World Religions Paradigm?

I have decided to upload some essays submitted for my bachelor’s degree that I was rather happy with. I am not necessarily happy with them for their quality (although some I am rather happy with in all respects), but instead in some cases because I find the literature referred to interesting, in other cases because I found some of the ideas that had made themselves into the essay to be ones that perhaps I should pursue further, and in some cases I just enjoyed writing them, among other reasons.

This essay I have chosen simply because it provides a brief overview of the issues that tend to drive my general hesitancy with our generous and loose use of the word “religion,” by problematising one of its most widespread pedagogical tools, the World Religions Paradigm. Throughout my undergraduate degree I more and more felt the overwhelming limitations and marginal benefits to the use of the concept of “religion,” this essay perhaps reflects the culmination of such frustrations.

I have slightly modified some of the formatting to translate this post onto the blog, but have endeavoured to lean towards the conservative side, preferring to maintain as much of the original character of the essay. Because of this, there are several typos that have been maintained, as well as several convoluted and unclear sentences, all products of both severe sleep deprivation and the condensing redactions precipitated by word count limitations. Though I was planning on more thoroughly polishing these aspects, I think there remains a certain flavour to the rushed university essay, and so, until I come to my senses, this essay, and the forecoming ones, remain as they are.

Does the paradigm of ‘world religions’ create an unsustainable distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’?

The Dutch thinkers who coined the term “World Religions,” began to critique it almost immediately after establishing it, establishing a trend of dissatisfaction with the term that has not subsided. Their central concern was the issue of demarcation: what characterises a religion to be “universal?”¹ The World Religions Paradigm, hereby the WRP, like any classification, is a social act defined by the historical context its genealogical roots pass through.² Following this trail of questioning demarcations and assumptions ultimately reveals the unsustainability held in the WRP’s current definitions, which bind it strictly to its historical context, namely the liberal Enlightenment. Herein “religion,” linked to the “sacred,” is defined in distinction to its opposite, the “secular,” carving out an identity for religion which is determined equally by defining what religion is not.³ This divide, a creation directly linked to the definition of the term “religion,” lacks explanatory power and is methodologically weak: by assuming its constructed distinction to be followed universally, and by lacking reflexive reflection through a veneer of “secular neutrality,” thereby perpetuating a deeply Christianity oriented structure. The results of this include an inherent colonialism, and a completely arbitrary dismissal of certain “religions,” due to their perceived “secular” nature.

The WRP is contemporarily utilised primarily pedagogically. Because of this, it is almost decentralised in its application: it is modified as to the teaching preferences of each teacher. Furthermore, it is almost universally critiqued as being insufficient and improper.⁴ Thus, differing hybrid and modified approaches have been adopted, which both utilise the paradigm and intend to incorporate critiques of it. This essay will primarily assume, as it is defined within an analytic rather than teaching context, the definition given by Carole Cusack:

“‘World religions’ are typically characterized by written scriptures, systematic theology, missions and proselytization, other-worldliness, professional clergy, exclusivism and universalism, and have been linked to expansionist economies and global understandings of warfare.”⁵

Timothy Fitzgerald, an influential voice in critical approaches to Religious Studies, stressing that the very conceptualisation of “religion” as a universal category in contemporary Western discourse is a “modern myth,”⁶ summarises the essence of his critique in The Ideology of Religious Studies:

[“Religion”] imposes on non-western institutions and values the nuance and form of western ones, especially in such popular distinctions as those between religion and society, or between religion and the secular, or religion and politics, or religion and economics. In addition, and in pursuit of this constructed image of the other religions, it draws up typologies of Judaeo-Christian monotheistic categories such as worship, God, monasticism, salvation, and the meaning of history and tries to make the material fit those categories.⁷

Fitzgerald takes his conclusions to a potential end of deconstructing the existence of Religious Studies as a field of study.⁸ Such conclusions and debates are beyond the scope of this essay. This essay is concerned with critiquing one specific paradigm, not proposing alternatives or discovering broader ramifications, however the strength of his critique, one which is held as powerful even by his strident interlocutors,⁹ does hold in problematising the foundations of the WRP.

In deconstructing “religion” that the WRP be deconstructed, there is a further layer of deconstruction required; that of the notions of divided sacred and secular domains, which is foundational to “religion;” “religion” being that which pertains to the “sacred.” Such a foundation is identified by Fitzgerald as developing within the Western context around the 17^th^ century, as part of a package of codependent Enlightenment categories: “the invention of the discourse on generic religion was also the invention of the discourse on secular reason.”¹⁰ The sacred, in this sense, is essential to the contemporary Western understanding of the world “religion.” It is also where it struggles to expand itself beyond the boundaries of its genealogical heritage, being not a “universal,” but a contextually contingent concept,¹¹ a concept that only continues to be treated as non-constructed “by [the] persistent use of the word.”¹²

To a degree, this line of reasoning, which subsists the underlying thesis of Fitzgerald’s work, can be, and has been, read as committing the genetic fallacy.¹³ His critique, however, does not act to discredit the Western model of religion purely on its having a genealogy. Instead, the genealogy shows that “religion” has genes, that it is a construct developed through historical particularities, and that therefore its universal relevance beyond that contingent scope is far from effective, explicitly on display in the WRP.¹⁴ The WRP, by inherently speaking of the world, runs into the problem of proposing a universal category which acts on a “global,” “world” scale: while perhaps being a meaningful category in the Western world, as Fitzgerald himself concedes,¹⁵ the construct of “religion” falls apart in different cultural contexts independent of Western discourse. It is an endeavour almost definitionally doomed to failure: the genealogically European Christian concept of “religion,” imposed onto the universal, catch-all category of “the world.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr notes that “it is only too obvious that these terms [the “secular” and “sacred”] do not have the same meaning in [Islamic discourse],” nor can these words be meaningfully translated into the classical Islamic languages.¹⁶ The entirety of Islamic existence is considered non-secular: in so far as something aligns with the natural law of reality, it is non-secular, sacred. At least so in the Islamic conception of Nasr, who further comments that this leaves an interesting situation where the boundary of the practice of Islam is not the demarcation of all that is sacred, and much that is practised in Islam is secular.¹⁷ He lists historical and contemporary examples that are counterintuitive to Western constructions of the “secular;” among these, of note and most exemplifying the overarching point, is his description of mathematics as sacred.¹⁸ Examples beyond Islam abound: the thoroughly political nature of ancient Israelite “religion,” with a Deuteronomistic History substantially focused on its political dimensions (politics being comfortably categorised today as secular),¹⁹ and almost entirely sidelining God;²⁰ Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda contradistinguishing devotional love for God (something strikingly “religious” in contemporary Western discourse) against “religions,”²¹ etc. With the essential requirement of defining “religion” being the demarcation of secular and sacred, it becomes exceedingly difficult to consistently apply it in contexts that at best have only slight analogues to that divide.²²

A further unsustainable aspect of the WRP is hinted at here: the shape which “religion” occupies on the sacred/secular chasm. The positionality of the drawer, herein European academics, and the religion they are using as the initial model, herein Protestant Christianity, determine the contour which religion carves into the secular/sacred; a dividing contour that is imposed on all the other “religions.” Tomoko Masuzawa develops her critique of the WRP through this: for all its attempts at posing as “secular,” the WRP is still nevertheless Christian, particularly Protestant, and is able to perpetuate its colonial past through false posturing of a “secular” identity. The aforementioned definition of the WRP demonstrates this, stressing scriptures, proselytism, systematic theology, and other features that are specific points of emphasis and identity for Protestant Christianity. To express the standard of “world engaging” as being proximity to Christianity is a slight of hand performed under the distraction of the rhetoric of “secularism.” The contour then of a “World Religion” is succinctly defined by Jonathan Z. Smith: a “world religion is simply a religion like ours.”²³ A case study of this in action is Anderson’s essay on World Christianity, wherein he, within the context of a deconstruction of the WRP, still uses it to assert the exclusive, sui generis nature of Christianity among the other “religions,” making it uniquely a “World Religion.”²⁴ That Christianity is recognised here as uniquely a “World Religion” reflects that perhaps a “World Religion” is simply a thinly veiled model of Christianity.

In a slight tangent away from the instabilities in the WRP’s application, is an underlying subtext that has been present so far: the lack of reflexivity and positional self-reflection in the implementation of the WRP. This too is an unsustainable secular/sacred divide, mapped onto the also unsustainable subject/object distinction, wherein the scholarly gaze, placed within the constructed “secular,” is perceived as disinterested and passionless, guided “objectively” by the inherent gravity of the religions it analyses with no agendas,²⁵ what Fitzgerald describes as “the illusion that the secular is simply the real world seen aright in its self-evident factuality.”²⁶ By creating a “discourse of othering.”²⁷ wherein the “secular” becomes the natural, unadjusted state, and the “religious” the biased and conditioned “other,” the Western academy places itself in a position of power over and against the “religions” it analysed, empowering then further their Western and Christian frameworks and presuppositions.

This Westocentric action is an exertion of power. This is not lost on Nasr, who speaks of the construct of the “secular” as a “struggle” against a series of “deadly attack[s]… upon Islam.”²⁸ The paucity of mention of Indigenous religious traditions showcases the WRP’s inability to incorporate traditions that have not significantly interacted with the West, or do not fit into Protestant conceptions of missional, scriptural, systematic theology bearing “religion.”²⁹ Attempts to resolve this are ironically as problematic. Much like Hinduism (a monolithic “religion” created by colonial administration homogenising the wide heterogeneous mix of Indic religions)³⁰ the recent addition to the WRP by some of “African Religion” conflates numerous diverse African religious traditions, and attributes “omniscience” and other Christian divine qualities to their deities, and ultimately creates a non-existent caricature of African religions.³¹ Either omitted by not fitting the Christian contour, or oversimplified to the point of misrepresentation because they are outside the historiographical scope of Europe, the WRP simply echoes the concerns of a Christian Europe by marginalising and minimalising that which is peripheral to the “secular” West.

Returning then to the implementation of the WRP, each tradition, though each having its contours drawn differently, is often treated, especially in the WRP, as being among roughly equivalent, exclusive options. Walls’ analogy of a variety of different shirts that can be worn and taken off to be replaced by another, is fitting.³² Each one of these “shirts” exists independently as an alternative to the other, an interchangeability reflected in sentences like “I used to be Muslim, now I am Christian”. Each tradition is treated as having a “Platonic form” that is incarnated into its secular context; forms that are sui generis and independent from the secular domain. This is highly complicated by the intense diversity within each “religion:” can the teetotal, individualistic, hyper-polytheist Mormonism meaningfully be placed in the same family category, and therefore embodying the same abstract “Christianity,” as collectivist Trinitarian Eastern Orthodoxy? All while excluding ʿAlawīs, with their celebration of Christmas, belief in a “divine triad” and sacramentalised wine?³³ The disregard of the shirt like rigidity of these contours on a global level further problematises the issue. Within the Indian subcontinent exist both self-identifying Hindus who hold Jesus to be the unique and supreme expression of divinity, and yet refuse the standard Christian identity “boundary marker” of baptism, and self-identifying Muslims who hold the same High Christology and yet continue to iterate the shahada, the standard Islamic identity “boundary marker:”³⁴ the former an insider denying a the standard boundary marker for an insider, the second furthering this further by actively participating in the insider identity marker for a completely different tradition. These examples reflect the unsustainability of the WRP’s sacred/secular contour even within Christianity, let alone on a “world” level.

This disregard for the WRP’s contours carves deeper into the sacred/secular divide. Commenting on this, theologian David Bentley Hart writes:

“There definitely is a distinctly American Christianity. It is something protean, scattered, fragmentary, and fissile, often either mildly or exorbitantly heretical, and sometimes only vestigially Christian, but it can nevertheless justly be called the American religion.”³⁵

The malleability (and almost liquidation) of any contour is not held within a general field of the “sacred,” such as Islam blending with Christianity in a way completely ignoring the constructed distance between the two “World Religions,” but further penetrating into the realm of the “secular.” Were there to be one of the “Platonic Forms” mentioned earlier, the American Civil Religion is much closer to approximating it, as noted by Hart earlier, and yet the WRP would still require it be categorised “Christian.”³⁶ Further, The Nation of Islam is almost indecipherable as a product of Islam. Though it claims adherence many standard beliefs in Orthodox Islam,³⁷ these beliefs are expressed and interpreted in a way that is very distinct and unique to the “secular” context of post-abolition America.³⁸ In it, not only are Black people the original and greater people,³⁹ but Allah himself “was a Black man.”⁴⁰ Not only is its theology of genesis so, but its eschatology too: the iconically Abrahamic yearning for Resurrection is no longer interpreted as a post-mortem salvific state, but instead the realisation of Black consciousness against White oppression.⁴¹ Ultimately, the religion itself is a product not of an overarching global identity of “Islam,” permutating itself into the Black American context, but instead it is a complex interplay of factors, rendering the what is considered “secular,” herein politics and racial identity, directly the “sacred.” Even further, Hindutva, the Hindu Nationalist ideology (which can be translated as “Hindu-ness,” an articulation of Hindu identity),⁴² was popularised and philosophised by the avowed atheist Savarkar,⁴³ who articulated Hindu identity as being beyond a religion, but instead “a history.”⁴⁴ While it may be contested that the political nature of his movement makes it a poor example of “religion,” such a characterisation would continue trying to force this unsustainable divide: Savarkar appeals to scriptural narratives and aspects of Hindu theology throughout his works, including novel interpretations of famous scriptural passages.⁴⁵ Fitzgerald’s own example, Ambedkar’s Dalit Buddhist movement,⁴⁶ provides a further of many examples.

As much as many of the “religions” resist the WRP, Communism, especially in certain schools, holds to a strong proselytising ethos, encouraging realising an eschatology of class revolution.⁴⁷ It proposes an interpretative meta-narrative of history, even in post-Marxist understandings, with “Ideology” and its associated concepts as overarching narratives of the world.⁴⁸ It has a presence well beyond the German boundaries of its origin, even in a post-Soviet world, still holding a substantial presence in multiple nations. It is confounding that the WRP does not list Communism. Beyond Communism, is not Santa Claus, in Coca-cola attire, the iconographic flag-bearer of the evangelical conquest of American Civil Religion? And is not the Japanese celebration of Christmas with KFC, Disney, McDonald's, and Coca-cola, in a nation of around 1% self identifying Christians, a sign of the success of the American Civil Religion's expansionism?⁴⁹ Thus neither Communism, nor the Cult of America, the expansionary vision of which has justified its shaping of a post-World War world, and continuing to justify its invasive acts of imperialism, are listed in the WRP, fitting as they are to its criteria to qualify as a “World Religion.” That they are not listed exemplifies the arbitrary and unsustainable sacred/secular distinction determining the paradigm.

In a modernist blindness to positionality, the WRP unreflexively perpetuates problematic and unsustainable attempts at universalising a secular/sacred distinction that is barely relevant to the context of Western Religious discourse. This results in a paradigm that does not meaningfully or constructively map out the nature of its focus of study, instead obfuscating details through an awkard imposition of a foreign schema. This not only prevents a meaningful interaction with “religions,” the WRP’s object of study, but further seeks to reiterate and reinforce colonial power structures and oppression. While this critique has been offered, the now perennial issue of what to do in its place arises.⁵⁰ It is perhaps because of the destabilised position that Religious Studies is left in when it fully accepts this deconstruction that prevents an alternative system from broad acceptance: both Fitzgerald and his critics note the underlying anxiety of the results of his deconstruction.⁵¹ Nevertheless, the WRP is problematic enough that an alternative schema must be adopted in place of its popularity.

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