exposure and explanation: on the new protectionism in the study of religion

American Academy of Religion

Exposure and Explanation: On the New Protectionism in the Study of ReligionAuthor(s): Tyler RobertsSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 143-172Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40005881 .

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Exposure and Explanation: On the

New Protectionism in the Study of Religion Tyler Roberts

This essay argues that some of the crucial theoretical advances in the study of religion in recent years - important as they are - continue to trade on polemic and misguided views of theology that obscure and dehistoricize a complex and evolving relationship between theology and the study of religion. The essay makes this case by examining how some of the more interesting advances in the field come together in the work of Russell McCutcheon. It then seeks to illuminate points of intersection between theology and theory to argue that theology can function critically in the context of the study of religion. The purpose here is not to erase all distinctions between theology and the study of religion but, rather, to begin working toward a more satisfactory formulation of the limits of various modes of interpretation and explanation in the study of religion.

Theology is the very discourse that is most in need of the radically historicist, postmodern critique.

- Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion

Theology must rediscover itself as a language that assists us in being mortal.

- Rowan Williams, "The Suspicion of Suspicion"

Tyler Roberts is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College, Grinnell,IA 50112-1690.

I would like to thank Ed Gilday, Sam Gill, Jacob Rhoads, Kathleen Skerrett, Hent de Vries, and the members of the Center for the Humanities at Grinnell College for the valuable advice they contributed to this piece.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion March 2004, Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 143-172 DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfh007 © 2004 The American Academy of Religion



1 44 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

IN HER 1996 REVIEW ESSAY entitled "Modernism and Postmod- ernism in the Study of Religion," Catherine Bell offers a provocative diagnosis of two chronic methodological debates afflicting the study of religion.1 The first pits "modernists" endorsing social scientific methods for studying religion against those suspicious of explanatory approaches to religion (Bell: 179). The second debate features "postmodernists" who radicalize the modernist critique of theology with historicist studies of the political and cultural embeddedness of religious and academic discourses. Bell's modernists and postmodernists thus line up against those who argue for phenomenologically or theologically oriented approaches to religion. Bell argues that such debates are "variations of a fundamental polarization between 'insider' claims to experience something in one set of terms and 'outsider' claims to explain that experience in very different terms" (187). Further, and strikingly, she suggests that these debates cannot be resolved on their own terms because both sides "set up their terms in fundamentally reciprocal or oppositional relationships in which they are foils for defining each other" (187).

I find Bell's diagnosis persuasive and believe that scholars of religion need to consider how they might extract themselves from the polarizations she identifies. This essay examines some consequences of this polarization and begins to consider how scholars of religion might extract themselves from it. Taking as a point of departure Bell's observation that the debates she discusses are characterized by a "nearly para- noid degree of anti-theology polemic" (187), the first part of the essay returns to the seemingly perennial and, for some, tiresome question of the "compatibility" of theology and religious studies (Smith 1997).2 Against those - modernists and postmodernists alike - who would put this question to rest, I argue that some of the crucial theoretical advances in the study of religion in recent years - important as they are - continue to trade on polemic and misguided views of theology. Even if, in the end, we agree with J. Z. Smith (1997: 61) that one way to

1 Bell's essay focuses on Samuel Preus's Explaining Religion, Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley's Rethinking Religion, and Talal Asad's Genealogies of Religion. For a critical view of Bell's essay, see Wiebe 2000.

2 Since Bell's essay, the rhetorical energy of this polemic continues to be exploited. For a particularly telling example, see the exchange between Ivan Strenski and Gary Lease in response to Strenski's "Religion, Power and Final Foucault" (1998a). Lease, objecting to what he describes as the "personal animus" of Strenski's criticisms, complains that Strenski has embarked on a "crusade" to achieve the "redemption" of society that threatens to turn the university into an "evangelistic tent show." According to Lease, the university should be devoted to knowledge and not the "preaching of a message" (377-378). In his rejoinder to Lease, Strenski accuses Lease of "sermonizing]," of writing out of a "conversion experience," and of setting his views "into the concrete of neo-religious dogmatism" (1998b: 383).



Roberts: Exposure and Explanation 1 45

make the distinction is to view theology as "data" for scholars of religion, many influential scholars simply are doing a poor job of accounting for and describing their data.3

It seems to me, though, that clear distinctions between theory and data end up obscuring and dehistoricizing a complex and evolving relationship between theology and the study of religion. The second part of the essay seeks to illuminate some of this complexity - some points of intersection between theology and theory and between the religious and the secular - and so to suggest that theology can function critically in the context of the study of religion. My purpose is not to erase all distinctions between theology and the study of religion but, rather, to begin working toward a more satisfactory formulation of the limits of various modes of interpretation and explanation in the study of religion.4

EXPLAINING THEOLOGY?

This first part of the essay focuses on the work of Russell McCutcheon, author of Manufacturing Religion (1997) and Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (2001) and coeditor of Guide to the Study of Religion (Braun and McCutcheon). McCutcheon's work is usefully provocative and, at the moment, highly visible.5 Even more important, because McCutcheon borrows heavily from some of the most important and influential theorists in the field, his work provides an excellent lens through which to examine theory - and, in my view, some deep problems with theory - in the study of religion today.6

McCutcheon defends an approach to religion that he describes as both "naturalist" and "postmodern" (2001: 61). Following Samuel Preus, McCutcheon (1997: ix-x) argues that the naturalist, explanatory approach to religion has been marginalized by the field's dominant paradigm. This so-called dominant paradigm has a rich history, but McCutcheon identifies it, above all, with Mircea Eliade's phenomenologically driven sui generis approach to religion. McCutcheon sees the Eliadean project as fatally flawed because it smuggles ontological and normative claims into its

3 Bruce Lincoln also makes this distinction in his "Theses on Method": "History is the method and Religion the object of study" (1996: 225).

For further reflections on these issues, see also my forthcoming Ideology and the Study of Religion."

For previous responses to McCutcheon, see, among others, Arnal; Benavides; Geertz; Griffiths 1998a, 1998b; Hart 1998; MacKendrick; Penner; and Rennie 1998, 2000.

In particular, I am interested in McCutcheon's borrowings from Bruce Lincoln and J. Z. Smith. I will also have occasion to remark on McCutcheon's close connections with Willi Braun, Gary Lease, Samuel Preus, and Donald Wiebe.




account of religion and appeals to nonobservable "experiences" of the sacred. For McCutcheon, these moves erect a set of protective discursive rules that delegitimate the explanatory, social scientific scholarship that McCutcheon and others view as the only scholarship appropriate for the academy. Scholars, in other words, should reject Eliadean protectionism and begin with the premise "that human behaviors always originate from within, and derive their culturally embedded meanings from being constrained by, historical (i.e. social, political, economic, biological, etc.) entanglements" (McCutcheon 2001: 6-7). Whatever else religion might be, McCutcheon holds, it does involve empirically , accessible social behaviors that have real effects, and these should be the focus of explanatory accounts of religion.

I find McCutcheon's criticisms of the sui generis approach to religion largely persuasive; I applaud his call for a "methodological pluralism" that conceives of the field as a site for inter- or multidisciplinary work involving description, interpretation, and explanation; and I find illumi- nating McCutcheon's own efforts to explain religion as "social formation" (2001: 2 1-42). 7 I agree, then, that scholars of religion should welcome methods and explanations grounded in the social sciences and should not be constrained by the vocabularies and claims of "insiders" when it comes to examining and explaining the political and social effects of religious behavior and religious intellectual activity.

Yet I also think that McCutcheon constantly slips from these relatively modest and constructive claims to prescriptions for the field that are anything but pluralistic.8 As one explores his view of "theology" and of the discursive rules that he thinks should guide academic work, it becomes clear that his call for methodological pluralism is, in fact, a prescription for a new protectionism. What is Theology?

In large part McCutcheon's criticisms of Eliade echo challenges that have been posed to the Eliadean project for years now.9 But in at least one

7 I am not at all sure that the sui generis paradigm dominates the field to nearly the degree McCutcheon claims. However, he (1997) does raise important questions about its influence on introductory textbooks in the field. In addition, Wiebe (1997) has gathered interesting evidence for the way this and related paradigms have been endorsed by AAR presidents of the recent past. But my own, admittedly unsystematic, observation of young scholars coming out of major graduate programs in religion today suggests that the Eliadean paradigm is just one among many.

Because or this slippage, one can find many unobjectionable and apparently pluralistic statements in his writing. These are undermined, I argue, by McCutcheon's rigid views of religious discourse and of the discursive rules of the academy.

That such criticisms are nothing new should already alert us to potential problems with McCutcheon's claims about "dominant" paradigms. See Strenski 2002.



Roberts: Exposure and Explanation 147

respect McCutcheon takes these criticisms further. It has been common- place for scholars to accuse Eliade and many of his phenomenological colleagues of "cryptotheology," that is, of working from the fundamental premise that the "sacred" refers to an ontologically real, transcendent entity. McCutcheon is sympathetic to this criticism but also argues that by assuming "theology" to be a distinct form of discourse, such criticism remains tied too closely to the phenomenon scholars of religion should be explaining. Because the job of such scholars is to explain or "redescribe" religion, rather than simply describe what religious people say or do, they need to move to a higher level of analysis by employing concepts that abstract or generalize from "insider" language (McCutcheon 2001: 134). Because McCutcheon is particularly interested in religion as a sociopolitical phenomenon, he wants to examine the way people talk about their gods, not in terms of "theology" but in terms of the more general categories "social formation" and "authorizing practices" (1997: 16, 2001: 139).

Yet the fact remains that the category "theology" is constitutive of McCutcheon's vision of the study of religion: even though he seems to relegate conceptual binaries between theology and nontheology (and even "religious" and "secular") to the status of data to be explained, his arguments constantly trade on these same binaries (2001: 117). That is, only by means of such distinctions can he sustain other distinctions that are central to his vision of the field: distinctions between "insider" and "outsider" and between the proper institutional sites for various kinds of reflection on religion.

McCutcheon's view of theology takes shape in his appropriation of Bruce Lincoln's definition of religion. In his "Theses on Method" Lincoln asserts that religion is "that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal" (1996: 225). By contrast, Lincoln goes on, the discourse of history "speaks of things temporal and terrestrial in a human and fallible voice, while staking its claim to authority on rigorous critical practice" (1996: 225). Lincoln offers a slightly different version of this definition in his contribution to Braun and McCutcheon's Guide to the Study of Religion. There he claims that the "defining characteristic" of religion is that it "invest [s] specific human preferences with transcendent status by misrepresenting them as revealed truths, primordial traditions, divine commandments and so forth" (2000: 416). In comparison with other discourses, he says, religion performs this function in "uniquely stabilizing fashion" (2000: 416).

At least two points should be emphasized here. First, like McCutcheon, Lincoln trades on a diametrical opposition between the types of authority to which religion, on the one hand, and the academic enterprise, on the




other, appeal. Second, although Lincoln's definition focuses on "religious discourse" and "religion" in general, implicit in this definition is the claim that "theology" - as a particular form of religious discourse - also claims "transcendent and eternal authority" and so "misrepresents" its human character.10 Such an approach to theology, which is evident in McCutcheon, will be my focus here.

McCutcheon quotes Lincoln's definition of the study of religion with approval in the essay "The Imperial Dynamic in the Study of Religion" (2000: 277), and the definition leaves its traces throughout his writing, as I demonstrate below. It also appears to play a significant role in shaping the editorial perspective of Braun and McCutcheon's recent Guide to the Study of Religion. Braun (10) quotes it approvingly in the programmatic essay that introduces the collection. There, he acknowledges that the Guide "comes with a bit of an 'attitude,'" for which, it becomes evident, Lincoln's approach to religious discourse is formative. Citing Lincoln, Braun writes that the desire to speak with "transcendent and eternal" authority is a key to the "rhetorical propensity" of religion. Describing this propensity in his own words, Braun contrasts the "uncensored curiosity" of scholars of religion with the "confessional" and "apologetic" con- straints placed on theologians by "knowledge frameworks of religious structures" (7). He goes on to conflate theology, ontology, and the discourse of the sacred as "obscurantist" discourses that "subvert a research strategy whose aim is to enlist the study of religion as a contributing partner in the pursuit of a science of human social life" (5).

10 This move from "religion" as a "discourse" to theology needs to be made with care. Lincoln understands "discourse" not just as verbal communication but also as including "the symbolic discourses of spectacle, gesture, costume, edifice, icon, musical performance and the like" (1989: 4). It is conceivable, then, that Lincoln might argue that even if theologians do not always explicitly or consciously endow their discourse with transcendent authority, once we examine the structure and function of religious discourse more generally, it becomes clear that such theologians nevertheless contribute to the establishment of such authority. But even if one accepted this, it seems that Lincoln's use of discourse in his "Theses on Method" (1996) is not as clear as it might be. He describes "religion," "history," and "history of religions" as "discourses." Where the first might be taken in the broad sense of the term, it seems that the other two should be taken more narrowly, as specific, verbal, academic disciplines. But then, if the comparison Lincoln is making between history and religion as discourses is really to work, it seems that we should take "religion" more narrowly, as the verbal, academic (or intellectual) element of religious discourse, i.e., theology. Moreover, it is difficult to tell whether Lincoln sees this comparison as descriptive or normative. Does "history," in fact, do what he says it does, or does he think it should do it? If it is the former, I am not sure that we should agree, given all the different ways historians have understood what they were doing; if it is the latter, then what does this say about his characterization of "religion"? Finally, regardless of what Lincoln is doing with this contrast, it is clear that in McCutcheon's hands, the slip from "religion" as discourse to "theology" is being made all the time. This is particularly clear in his chapter on Garrett Green, in which theology is characterized as a discourse that claims as its "basis of authority some kind of inspiration from beyond history" (2001: 107).




Lincoln, Braun, and McCutcheon render religious discourse as the "other" of historical, academic discourse (and, so doing, provide evidence for Bell's argument). Theology is not just the "object" of academic discourse - data - it helps define academic discourse: theology is that which must be excluded for academic discourse to be what it is. McCutcheon puts it plainly when he writes that the discursive rules he defends allow him "to describe some [discourses] as theological, mythic, or simply ideological (those that presume essential, ontological status to their con- structs) and others to be naturalistic (those that acknowledge the constitutive role of the theorist and the theory)" (2001: 109). Is this an adequate account of religious discourse in general and theology in particular? Many theologians would object to this characterization of their work. It is true that as McCutcheon avowedly champions redescription and explanation, he would respond to such objections by saying that the judgment of theologians should not be his prime concern here. And this, it seems to me, is right, at least insofar as it means that, as scholars, we have to be open to the possibility that theologians may be wrong about what they do. It is right, but is it enough?

In the opening pages of the Guide Braun writes: "Researching the world we live in ... is always a complex exercise of selecting, inventing, and fiddling with categories in order to render - to force - the natural world and the range of human doings as intelligible, differentiated, ours to respond to, to make and remake" (3, emphases added). This comment is telling, in both positive and negative senses. Positively, and in another clear indication of the editorial perspective shared by Braun and McCutcheon, Braun signals here his allegiance to J. Z. Smith, who insists that scholars acknowledge their own agency in developing theories of religion.11 Smith expresses this insistence famously when he writes: "Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study" (1982: xi). The influence of this claim is well deserved, though its hyperbolic character has to be kept in mind. Thus, Sam Gill, a close reader of Smith, argues that although academic theorizing is in some sense "hyperreal" and "fictional," it is in the end only "academic" if it is "demonstrably grounded in the reality of the subject" (460). Wayne Proudfoot, in a well-known argument, helps us understand what this might mean with his distinction between descriptive and explanatory reduction: for Proudfoot, only the latter is legitimate because it, unlike descriptive reductionism, is based in the careful description of the phenomenon in question, in terms that can "plausibly be ascribed" to the insider (181). McCutcheon (1997: 212)

11 For just one of the many instances where McCutcheon acknowledges his debt to Smith on this issue, see McCutcheon 2001: 19.



150 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

himself affirms Proudfoot's argument because he thinks, rightfully, that it legitimates the kind of explanatory approach to religion that he himself champions. But, of course, it does more than this, for it makes imperative, as a condition for such legitimacy, careful, close description of the phenomena in question, description that, at least in some sense, must correspond with the perspective of "insiders."

Searching through the writings of Braun and McCutcheon, one looks in vain for the kinds of careful description of theological work that could ground the sweeping redescriptions of religious discourse they offer (I examine one of the rare exceptions to this rule below).12 Instead, their view of research, as in the passage cited above from Braun, renders reality docile to the constructive theoretical gaze by "forcing" the world and its inhabitants to intelligibility (it is, after all, "our" world).13 Evidence for the problems that follow such hubris come to light when we realize that although most theologians do speak about things transcendent and eternal (though there are many different ways of doing this), careful description shows that it is simply false to assert or imply that all theologians desire to speak with transcendent and eternal authority. One must conclude, then, that Braun and McCutcheon engage in what Proudfoot would call "descriptive reductionism."

To support this contention, let me offer just a few, brief examples of relatively mainstream Christian theologians who in one way or another explicitly acknowledge the immanent, historical, and therefore fallible character of religious discourse in general and of theology in particular. My point is not that the claims of any of these thinkers are incontestable but simply that they must be accounted for by theorists proposing to define and critique theology. That is, a defense of any particular redescription must persuade us that such thinkers, despite their claims to the contrary, know not what they do. Thus, Kathryn Tanner argues that theologians need to take the "anthropological turn" and view theology as

12 One exception to this rule can be found in the work of Donald Wiebe, who has devoted an amazing amount of energy to the theology/ religious studies question over the years and who makes some generally useful distinctions among different types of "theology" in his effort to specify which kinds of discourse about "gods" have a place in the academic study of religion. Wiebe, though, bases his distinctions in a decidedly modernist, bordering on positivist, view of the "scientific" (and thus, for him, academic) enterprise that obscures important distinctions. See, for instance, his exchange with Francis Fiorenza (1994) and his account of "modernism" (2000). McCutcheon seems to be indebted to Wiebe in certain respects, but it is not at all clear that he has learned much from Wiebe's attempts to distinguish among types of theology; as I have been arguing, when McCutcheon invokes "theology" or "religious discourse," he relies on the sweeping claims he has borrowed from Lincoln.

Also see Kuipers's argument that the cultural criticism of religion must be based in Geertzian "thick description." He quotes Geertz: "What generality [an explanatory theory] contrives to achieve grows out of the delicacy of its distinctions, not the sweep of its abstractions" (87).




a "material social product that specializes in meaning production" (72); Rowan Williams says that "religious and theological integrity is possible as and when discourse about God declines the attempt to take God's point of view (i.e., a 'total perspective')" (2000a: 6); and Charles Winquist, in a way that directly counters McCutcheon's caricature, describes the conditions under which theology must operate as follows: "It would appear that in the contemporary period the conditions of intelligibility are secular and fully inscribed on a plane of immanence. Even if the world is not all that is the case, it is the world we know. Anything that is other will have to be other in the world if it is to be knowable" (1998b: 164). Finally, Francis Fiorenza, working out of Habermas's critical theory, argues that previous appeals to "theological sources or texts as 'absolute' authorities as if they were 'absolved' from historical and social conditions has become increasingly impossible" (1993: 35) and that theology in the university should be "comparative, historicist and explanatory" and "open to intersubjective pluralist discourse" (1994: 6). Fiorenza has explicitly engaged McCutcheon and others to argue that many of their historical and conceptual claims about the Christian theological tradition are based on superficial interpretation or highly contestable epistemological and hermeneutical claims (concerning, for example, the relationship between understanding and explanation and the distinction between natural and cultural sciences).14 For all his head shaking at the theoretical haplessness of scholars of religion, McCutcheon's polemics ignore basic scholarly protocols of evidence gathering and argumentation. Postmodernism and Discursive Rules

More problematic than McCutcheon's polemic is his protectionism. Let me defend this claim by examining his appeal to the "discursive rules" of the critical study of religion. McCutcheon employs this idea in order to make two distinctions: first, between the religious study of religion and the academic study of religion and, second, between the "modernist" precursors to McCutcheon's naturalism and his own "postmodernist" approach. Briefly, McCutcheon wants to distinguish religious from academic discourses based not on metaphysical, ontological truth claims (as modernist naturalists did) but, rather, on the use of different discursive rules, such as whether or not it is appropriate to appeal to "nonobvious" beings. McCutcheon can claim, therefore, that he is not judging religious discourse in any ultimate sense (its discursive rules "are neither good nor

14 Fiorenza (2000: 24-26), a recognized authority on Schleiermacher, argues that McCutcheon and others misunderstand Schleiermacher when they claim him as one of the originators of the sui generis discourse on religion.




bad [but] simply a brute fact of social ideologies and rhetorics" [2001: 129]). He can then use the distinctions he draws by means of rules to claim that theology is a "mythic discourse" (2001: 110) and that all such discourses should be excluded from the academic study of religion.

The idea of discursive rules is a useful one. For example, it is a helpful element of McCutcheon's criticisms of sui generis approaches to religion. But in McCutcheon's hands the idea is problematic. For one, and implicit in my discussion above, his conflation of theological and mythical discourse fails to examine the rules of theology with the requisite care. And, as I discuss now, because McCutcheon fails also to critique his own rules, he is not able to see the way in which they function as a protective strategy of the sort he accuses Eliade of propagating. Let us consider two of McCutcheon's rules: the theory/data distinction and the historicizing imperative.

Theory/Data In certain respects McCutcheon's insistence that all religious discourse,

including theology, is "data" for the scholar of religion is surely right. But this bald statement can be misleading if not carefully qualified. First, there is a difference between the kind of data that theorists of the natural world examine and the data that theorists of the human, cultural world examine. As Fiorenza points out, following Giddens and Habermas, there is a "double hermeneutic" (1994: 8) involved in the study of culture, which complicates the relationship between understanding and explanation.15 Second, it is important to distinguish between different kinds of religious behavior. Theology is reflexive and dialogical in ways that, say, prayer or ritual is not. That is, many theologians explicitly engage - they borrow from, critique, and interpret - nontheological discourses. Charles Winquist notes that although in some respects theology is a religious activity like ritual, it differs from such activity in that "at least some of the conditions of its possibility are epistemically isomorphic with the conditions that make the study of religion possible" (1998a: 305). The fact that both religious discourse (theology included) and theoretical discourse are data for theologians themselves renders unstable boundaries between theory and data.

It is not at all clear that McCutcheon attends to these issues when drawing the distinction between theory and data. He does recognize that the question of how to study "other" human beings has been a vexed one

15 Giddens writes that social science, "unlike natural science, deals with a pre-interpreted world where the creation and reproduction of meaning-frames is the very condition of that which it seeks to analyze, namely human social conduct" (158).




in anthropological circles for some time now. But his most sustained efforts to consider this problem have all been in support of the position that the theorist of religion need not be overly concerned with the problem of "understanding" (in contrast to "explaining") the other, for the theorist is engaged in redescription, which appropriately employs terms that "insiders" do not use.16 Thus, he is critical of Benson Saler's attempt, in Conceptualizing Religion, to "tame" ethnocentrism. Saler defends a dialogical approach to the "other" that seeks some form of "transcultural understanding" and is open to the possibility that indigenous folk categories might supplement the critical vocabulary of the scholar of religion. But such mixing of the academic and the "indigenous" is anathema for McCutcheon. He argues that it is already ethnocentric to assume that "others" are as interested as scholars of religion in developing cross- cultural generalizations with an eye to explaining religion. Generalization and explanation, he argues, are things in which "we" are interested, they are part of "our" "local knowledge." Thus, McCutcheon (2001: 80) continues, to employ others to help us with this project is to "appropriate" and "domesticate" their means for our ends and may perpetuate colonialist dynamics. If we are inevitably ethnocentric - our knowledges are all situ- ated - then instead of striving for greater transcultural understanding, we should see whether we can distinguish between more and less problematic kinds of ethnocentrism. McCutcheon claims that we can do this, for we can distinguish between theoretical efforts to redescribe others and normative discourses that judge others. Because redescription as a theoretical enterprise is self-conscious about the fact that it is creating a model of the world that in some respects will not be a perfect fit, the theorist is already aware of the limitations of his or her enterprise and should not be blamed for the lack of overlap in terms used by "insiders" and "outsiders."

But the ease with which McCutcheon uses terms like us and them, insider and outsider, or with which he asserts that "we are inextricably stuck with asking just our questions" obscures rather than clarifies, for it accedes to ahistorical abstraction by failing to acknowledge changes in and conflicts over who counts as "us" and which questions and tools are "ours." And this is not just to obscure past and present change but to help shape future discourse as well. McCutcheon (2001: 79), I think, mis- understands Saler's call to dialogue, viewing it simply as a matter of exploiting "their" categories instead of as a practice by which both parties come to ask new questions and to rethink the way they divide up the world. Further, because such rethinking is going to be an inevitable

16 1 am referring to the essays "The Imperial Dynamic in the Study of Religion" (McCutcheon 2000) and "We Are All Stuck Somewhere" (in McCutcheon 2001).




consequence of contact between peoples of different cultures, whether "we" are seeking understanding or explanation, it is useless to pretend that local knowledges will remain simply local. Bernard McGrane's criticisms of current ethnological paradigms can help illuminate these objections. For McGrane, most ethnologists are "epistemologically committed to the sovereignty of observation and its monologue about the Other rather than the democracy of genuine participation and its dialogue with the Other" (124). McGrane follows Tzvetan Toderov in claiming that it is only by speaking to the other, rather than just about the other, "that I can acknowledge him as subject, comparable to what I am myself (127). Despite McCutcheon's own well-stated and important concerns about repeating colonial relationships, the complex questions at issue here cannot be tidied up by "simply [acknowledging] that we base our observations on culturally determined values and theories" (2001: 82). This appeals to a kind of cultural hermeticism that "simply" does not exist but is being deployed by McCutcheon for protective purposes, to forestall exposure to certain kinds of questions and criticisms - to keep the "data" from talking back.

"Always Historicize"

McCutcheon borrows from Frederic Jameson to articulate a second discursive rule: "Always historicize" (1997: 213). While I have no doubt that historicizing religious and academic discourses is a fundamental task for scholars of religion, we should examine some of the consequences that follow from McCutcheon's deployment of this rule.

McCutcheon identifies two distinct ways of doing theory: theory as "explanation" and theory as "critique." "Explanation" has as its object religious behavior; "critique," however, has as its object theories of religious behavior. While explanation contextualizes religious behavior, critique contextualizes social scientific theoretical behavior so as to maintain awareness that such theories are only maps or models of reality and not reality itself (McCutcheon 2001: 111-115). Although McCutcheon rightly insists that we must be attentive to the distinction between these two modes of theory, it also is just as important, I contend, to keep in mind that they share the historicizing imperative: critique histoncizes theory, while explanation historicizes religion. What, then, critiques historicism? As I suggested in discussing the theory/data distinction, McCutcheon's approach to critique seals the scholar of religion from other kinds of criticism in a gesture as totalizing - or, to use McGrane's term, as "monological" - as the "theology" against which McCutcheon defines himself. This is not to say that the historicizing critique that McCutcheon recommends is not valuable for scholars of




religion; it is. Rather, the question is whether we can imagine a form of critique that allows us to think beyond the limits imposed by McCutcheon's historicism.17

Let me give an example. Early in Manufacturing Religion McCutcheon criticizes one scholar for arguing that religion is based "on interior experiences . . . characterized by a seeking and responding that accommo- dates, rather than originates from, emotional, intellectual and social needs" (1997: 9). McCutcheon argues that appeals to religious experience, like appeals to the sacred, serve to protect religion by locating it in the intuitive and private sphere of individual consciousness. Such appeals, he says, dehistoricize human experience. By contrast, "a thoroughly social theory of religion posits individual actors' intentions, plans, and organizations not as causes of but as artifacts that result from social formation" (McCutcheon 2001: 27). 18 McCutcheon (2001: 4, 137) thus argues that terms like religious experience, religious identity^ and religious impulses obscure the actual motives and behaviors of human beings and so are not useful explanatory categories. This leads him, rightly, I think, to object to discursive rules in which "religious feelings are used to explain other aspects of human behavior, but religious feelings can themselves never be explained as the result of other aspects of human behavior" (2001: 6). But note what McCutcheon does with this objection: rather than complicate the relation between religious feelings and other aspects of behavior, he simply reverses the relationship, contending that religious feelings (or experiences, beliefs, motivations, etc.) should never be used to explain aspects of human behavior. Thus, for him, we can talk about the socioeconomic or political "agendas" of sui generis scholars or about the "political" motivations of Buddhist monks, but nowhere is it made clear how we might usefully and justifiably talk about "religious" agendas or motivations. Hence, "historicizing" terms such as sociopolitical constitute a final academic vocabulary, from which religion or religious must be excluded.19

It is one thing to premise a research program on the hypothesis that experience is only a function of, and subjects are wholly constituted by,

17 Jameson himself, though, offers more resources for such a critique than McCutcheon. See my conclusion below.

To defend this claim, McCutcheon cites feminist historian Joan Scott: "The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation" (2001: 7). Scott is right, I think, to argue that such explanations must always be questioned, but see how Ann Taves qualifies Scott's historicism by insisting on the constructive role of the agent: subjects, she claims, "simultaneously constitute their experience and are constituted by it" (362nl). 19 Strenski (2002) makes this point in his review of Critics Not Caretakers.




history, but it is another to make such a premise a discursive rule for the study of religion tout court. It is one thing to agree to the impor- tance of studying the social and political functions of religion and to acknowledge that there are social and political causes of religion, but it is another to exclude from the start the possibility that there might be something academically significant to say about "religious" causes of behavior or about the limits of historicism. McCutcheon repeats the problem of the sui generis approach by erecting a new kind of protectionism. He does not call it protectionism or totalization but, rather, "scale." He declares that to be considered academically respectable the study of religion must confine itself to a naturalist-historical scale. There may, he acknowledges, be other scales with which to study religion, and no one scale gives us the "Truth," but to be academic means sticking to the explanatory scale that considers anything that cannot be observed - like the intuition that something is "sacred" - of no explanatory value. There is no consideration here of the possibility of the scholar working in terms of multiple scales. In particular, there is no reflection on the possibility that a useful approach to critique might emerge from thinking across scales and employing critically - in an academically viable way - the language of religion. I return to this below.

McCutcheon's Protectionism at Work

First, though, I will conclude this section of the essay by pointing to how McCutcheon's view of critique is limited on his own terms. As I have asserted, McCutcheon only rarely offers any sustained discussion of theological endeavors. An exception is his chapter in Critics Not Care- takers criticizing theologian Garrett Green's argument that Karl Barth should be viewed as a postmodernist theorist of religion. Here, McCutcheon makes two fundamental moves to establish "theology" as the "other" of theoretical academic discourse. First, he claims that theology cannot be postmodern because, as a discourse dependent on "grand narratives, teleology, essences, foundationalism, privilege and monolithic identities . . . [it] is the very discourse that is most in need of the radically historicist, postmodern critique" (2001: 107). That is, with his own claims to "postmodernism" secure, McCutcheon authorizes himself to undertake this critique, to make theology, as I have noted, simply "data," with no claim to the theoretical sophistication that McCutcheon himself possesses. Ironically, then, McCutcheon must assign theology the kind of "monolithic identity" that his postmodernism is supposed to critique.




McCutcheon's other move is to invoke his discursive rules. But whereas the appeal to "postmodernism" enabled him to set up a hierarchy between theology and the scholarly study of religion - the former not being as epistemologically self-conscious as the latter - McCutcheon's appeal to discursive rules calls for a discursive relativism that "entails the loss of normative status for any one discourse." In other words, McCutcheon wants to be able to appeal to a hierarchy between academic and theological discourse without making normative claims about theology and religion. Can he do this? Consider some of the apparently normative statements McCutcheon makes about theology: it is "obscuring [of] discursive relativity" (2001: 108); it is in need of "demystification" (2001: 109); and it threatens to "smuggl[e] a foundationalist perspective back within the academy" (2001: 120). McCutcheon would argue that such judgments are only being made within the "game" of academic discourse and should not be taken to imply normative judgments about the ultimate value of either academic or theological discourse. His point is that the academic game and the theological game need to be clearly distinguished and institutionally separated.

William Arnal (who, in most respects, seems to have real sympathy with McCutcheon's characterization of theology) notes a problem with this appeal to discursive relativity. He focuses on the way McCutcheon uses the metaphor of "game" to illuminate the "relativity" between academic theorizing and theology. For McCutcheon, these discourses must be kept separate for the same reason that we should not try to play singles and doubles tennis at the same time - it would be confusing and counterpro- ductive. McCutcheon makes the stakes of this threat of confusion clear when he writes that only theorists like him "are playing a game suited to the requirements of the public study of religion [and thus belonging in the university]" (2001: 116). But Arnal argues that McCutcheon's "game" metaphor is deceptive, in large part because choosing to play this or that game is never innocent. Who decides what "we" are going to play? Who has the equipment or the resources necessary to play? For Arnal, McCutcheon's argument for the institutional separation of theory and theology elides the material and political stakes involved, precisely the kinds of stakes that McCutcheon claims his form of critique is adept at identifying. Moreover, Arnal argues that McCutcheon smuggles in presuppositions about the nature of academic discourse and relies on modernist philosophical positions (Popper and Kant) in a way that makes his relativism "thoroughly modernist" (65). Arnal concludes that McCutcheon's appeal to "postmodernism," by which he sets up a fundamental opposition between academic and theological discourses, ends up producing "precisely the kind of authorizing totalization that postmodernism




categorically repudiates" (66). 20 One needs to ask, therefore, whether the theory/data hierarchy, which McCutcheon tries to soften with the appeal to discursive relativity, is as innocent as he wants it to be.

In sum, McCutcheon's appeal to discursive relativity obscures not only the material, political, and social differences between "secular" educational institutions and their "religious" counterparts but also the fact that, despite a "postmodernist" veneer, he holds an essentially modernist view of the conceptual hierarchy by which the study of religion is related to theology: the latter is "obscurantist," and the study of religion is precisely the means by which we can uncover theology's, and religion's, ideological strategies. Separation between the two is less a matter of conceptual and discursive clarity than a matter of protecting the study of religion from infectious exposure to theology. It is to the critical resources of such exposure that I now turn.

THEOLOGY UNPLUGGED

It is not surprising that a particular historical narrative, though not always made explicit, underlies the work of many of the theorists of religion I have been discussing. I refer here to the familiar modern story of a "secular" space of reason and politics emerging in European culture in response to the violence and unreason of religion. This narrative plays a substantial role in the contributions of Lincoln, Braun, and Donald Wiebe to the Guide to the Study of Religion. Lincoln recites the story in its classic form, citing the violence of the "religious wars" and asserting that "the secular nation-state learned to derive legitimacy from the people it governed rather than God" (2000: 418).21 Braun and Wiebe focus on another

20 Indeed, McCutcheon's frequent invocations of "postmodernism" are as problematic as his caricature of theology. To support his criticisms of Green's appeal to postmodernism, McCutcheon follows Pauline Rosenau's claim that deconstruction "reduces" discourses such as Marxism, Christianity, and feminism "to the same order and dismisses [them] ... as logocentric transcendental totalizing meta-narratives" (2001: 107). But this is a poor way to describe deconstruction, at least as practiced by Derrida, who affirms over and over that logocentrism and metaphysics are inevitable aspects of human discourse. The point, then, is not to see deconstruction as "dismissing" anything but, rather, as opening - over and over, for they will always close again - inevitably logocentric discourses to difference or, as I put it below, "singularity." McCutcheon thus simplifies one kind of postmodernism to suit his essentialization of theology. He also ignores the fact that for the last decade or so, Derrida has increasingly turned to questions of religion to explore the deconstructive resources within religious traditions themselves.

For William Cavanaugh, the kind of story told by Lincoln elides the complex reality of this period of violence. Without denying the role of religious conflict, Cavanaugh argues that the violence was also a manifestation of the "birthpangs of the state," that is, caused by "the aggrandizement of the centralizing territorial state over the remnants of the transnational ecclesial order and the remnants of local privilege and custom" (196).




strand of the narrative, each emphasizing the progress of reason and its impact on the study of religion. Thus, Braun contrasts the "uncensored curiosity" of academic discourse to the "confessional and apologetic requirements" of religious discourse and insists that, because the essays in the Guide work from the position that "concept formation ... is [the scholar's] primary obligation" (10), the collection represents yet another step forward in the march of reason. Wiebe's telling is close to Braun's, though more assertive, prescriptive, and dramatic. Wiebe's modernity is characterized, above all, by "a uniquely successful . . . culture-transcending science" (2000: 362). This success, however, remains vulnerable, having "come under increasing attack" since the end of the nineteenth century. Hence, the danger remains that we might fall back into a "premodern form of the study of religion." To prevent this, the fortress of science must be made more secure by ensuring that "the study of religion as a social science provide [s] us with the only acceptable model for the study of religion in the modern public university" (Wiebe 2000: 362-363).22

In each of these cases the narrative is propelled by the (progressive) development of a nonreligious sphere, whether of politics or the academy. What is crucial to note, though, is that this development is measured against a static, monolithic religion and its intellectual counterpart, theology. As they are secularized, politics and reason are transformed, but religion stays the same or, at most, dons the disguise of modernity or even postmodernity (thus, McCutcheon on Garrett Green) in order to beat back or overturn cultural changes of the past few centuries. In short, and in a narrative encoding the "oppositional relationships" about which Bell warns us, there is a story to tell about the development and success of the academic study of religion, but there is no story to tell about theology.

Perhaps one way to move beyond Bell's "polarizations" is to tell a new story. This story would not necessarily dismiss the idea that some progress has been made in the way academics theorize religion, but it would give a richer account of modern and postmodern religious thought and discourse as something other than apologetic rearguard action. The full story would be complex, for theology in the past 200 years is no longer, if it ever was, one thing. Here I can only gesture toward one of the important subplots of such a story.

22 Lincoln's discussion of modernity and religion also partakes of this narrative device as he ends the essay by confronting us with the specter of "novel Wars of Religion" (2000: 421). A more complete account of how this narrative functions would require examination of Preus's influential study on the naturalistic tradition in the study of religion, Explaining Religion. Catherine Bell refers to the "nearly teleological ethos with which Preus narrates the development of the naturalistic accounts of religion" and states that he "nearly demonizes theology" in the process (180).




I begin by noting that when Lincoln and McCutcheon fasten on claims to "transcendent authority" as characteristic of theological discourse, they attend only to one of the ways transcendent functions in such discourse: to identify a perspective absolutely unconstrained by the vicissitudes of human history. But this is to ignore the fact that in the monotheisms deriving from the Hebrew Bible, for example, to say that God is transcendent also means that God is in some sense unknowable and that we humans, and all our words and arguments, are finite and fallible.23 John Milbank claims, rightfully, that not only these monotheisms but also Hinduism and Buddhism "contain, in different ways, protocols of caution with respect to the human conception of the transcendent, which tend to foreground also the purely human origins of institutions, like kingship, that are often taken to be sacred in character" (135).24

In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam this second sense of transcendent has been particularly prominent in various "negative theologies," which in recent years have been the subject of renewed historical study and the source of much philosophical and theological reflection.25 In general, this work suggests that it is a mistake to view theological discourse simply as a foundationalist, mystifying "authorizing practice" in the service of identity, stability, and cohesion. Instead, theological discourse can function to relativize, interrupt, or transgress discourses, including its own.26 This transgressive nature of theology has been made particularly clear in the recent convergence of negative theologies with the philosophical "heter- ologies" associated with figures such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger.27

This convergence is particularly evident in recent efforts to trace and question the boundaries between philosophical and theological discourse in light of the deconstructive work of Derrida, the psychoanalysis of Lacan, and the ethics of Levinas. Here we have a "postmodernism" of which McCutcheon takes no account - and, I contend, a perspective that

23 One can find many places in which this tension between two senses of transcendent is dealt with. For one recent statement, see Williams 2000b: 183; for another, see Schrag.

In his account of the resurgence of "public religion" in the modern world, Jose Casanova makes a similar point when he describes the "Janus face" of religion in terms of the "carrier not only of exclusive, particularist, and primordial identities but also of inclusive, universalist, and transcending ones" (4).

25 See, e.g., Caputo; Carlson; de Certeau; Derrida 1992; de Vries 1999, 2002; Hart 1989; Hollywood; Marion; Sells; Taylor; and Turner 1995.

One must grant, however, that any complete examination of theology's and religion's transgressive character would have to consider ways in which such transgression, viewed not in isolation but in its social, cultural, and political context, can actually serve social stability, as the work of Victor Turner on ritual suggests. Of course, the same must be said about McCutcheon's own claims to "transgression." One would also want to differentiate the kind of transgressive function I discuss here from the kinds of "contestation" that McCutcheon (2001: 32) and Lincoln (1985) usefully discuss.

See Rodolphe Gasche's (88-97) discussion of "heterology."




enables us to see how theological thought might articulate a form of what McCutcheon calls "critique" that attends carefully to some of the aporias of scholarship that his critique avoids. Such theologically inflected critique makes it possible to insist on the material, historical embeddedness of all human discourse and behavior at the same time that it attends to the unstable boundary between descriptive and normative claims and to enigmas of transcendence such as human freedom.28 Derrida puts it this way in urging us to "think" the gift, even as we recognize the impos- sibility of such thinking: "It is a matter - desire beyond desire - of responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible both to the injunction or the order of the gift (give) as well as to the injunction or the order of meaning (presence, science, knowledge)" (1991: 30). Or as Eric Santner, quoting Franz Rosenzweig, puts it, theology can "unplug" us (in a carefully qualified sense) from history and identity by attuning us to "the surplus of the real within reality" (118). Here I can only gesture toward a defense of this claim by invoking three contemporary thinkers working at the boundaries of religious and secular discourse - Santner, Charles Win- quist, and Hent de Vries. Each radically refigures the theological in a way that challenges received views - whether Eliade's or McCutcheon's - of the study of religion.

Theology as a Discourse of Singularity McCutcheon identifies theology with logocentrism and argues that theo-

logy is therefore in need of a "radically historicist, postmodern critique." By contrast, Winquist argues that theology (at least in certain forms) already engages in the "critique of logocentrism." "God" for Winquist is not a foundational, stabilizing referent but, rather, a sign of aporia and alterity; theology, therefore, as a discourse centered on this sign - God - is a "search for the 'other' and the 'other of language'" (1995: 96). This search is bound to fail, for it is a matter of language trying to articulate that which is not language. Nonetheless, it is a useful and necessary search, for, Winquist argues (as both Santner and de Vries do in different ways), theological discourse can register the effects of the other of language.29

28 Of course, any invocation of "enigma" or "mystery" will elicit accusations of "mystification" from critics such as McCutcheon. One of the questions that needs to be pursued further, then, is whether the study of religion can learn anything from Levinas's "phenomenology of the

unphenomenologizable" or from Heidegger's "phenomenology of the inapparent" in making claims to mystery that are not mystifying.

Cf. Rowan Williams, who writes that theology, as a critical discourse, deals with a gratuitous mysteriousness," a sense of language "trying unsuccessfully to keep up with a datum that is in excess of any foresight, any imagined comprehensive structure" (2000b: xv).




Theology, from this perspective, is a critical practice (not necessarily the only one) of becoming attuned to "singularity." According to Winquist, singularities are "points of resistance within the interpretive meaning of experience" and, as such, are excluded by interpretive or explanatory discourses of "homogenization, abstraction, or universalization" (1995: 48-50). We encounter singularities in our own experience, in language, and in (and as) other people; though it draws lines too starkly, one might say that psychoanalysis attests to the first of these; deconstruction, to the second; and Levinasian ethics, to the third. For example, citing Levinas, Santner writes that each person is not exhausted by the predicates that form his or her "identity" - that there is to each of us, beyond those characteristics that can be specified, a "surplus of being, this existential exaggeration that is called being me - this protrusion of ipseity into being" (74). In one sense, we might say that everything is a singularity: each particular experience, (iteration of a) word, or person exists only as a unique event, embedded in a unique network of other words, persons, and occurrences. In another sense, though, nothing is singular because we can only identify and "know" things - words, persons, and events - insofar as they are identifiable in and through language.

This is the tension with which deconstruction works as a practice of memory; its task is to remember singularity, to constantly reassert singularity over and against its inevitable forgetting by logocentric classification and generalization. This is a task that is never finished. Similarly, psychoanalysis works as "an accounting for discontinuities in experience" (Winquist 1995: 29).30 Santner elaborates this point in his work on Rosenzweig, who, Santner notes, described as an "absolute empiricism" the method by which he cultivated "attunement to the surplus of the real within reality" (118). We might describe theology as understood by Winquist, Santner, and de Vries (or deconstruction as understood by Derrida and psychoanalysis as understood by Lacan) as one form of such absolute empiricism. Its task is not to explain or decipher singularities but first of all to open discourse to them, to interrupt or disturb ordinary ways of communicating and interacting with others and ways of "being ourselves" in order to attend to distur- bances caused by that which is ordinarily, and necessarily, excluded from consciousness or occluded by various discursive strategies.

Discourse on singularity is "theological" when the invocation of God signals the representational incompleteness of its own discourse. For Winquist, the name "God" "instantiates a radical negativity within

30 For some provocative and related reflections on the relationship between the "visceral" and the "representational," especially in relation to the practice of "desanctifying identity," see William Connolly's (25-29, 175-177) account of the "infrasensible."




discursive practice and is, as such, a paradigmatic singularity" (1995: 103). Santner comes at the question of "God" a bit differently, writing that "God" is experienced as a "pressure to be alive to the world" (9). But this is essentially the flip side of Winquist: what from one perspective is a negativity, something unsaid, or a gap or point of resistance in discourse or consciousness is from another perspective an indicator of something "more," of an "excess." The point of theology as a critical discourse (as with deconstruction and psychoanalysis) is to open ourselves up to this excess. De Vries combines both perspectives on God when he defines theology as "no longer . . . church dogmatics, or biblical exegesis, but as the self-articulation, exposition, and reenactment of faith . . . that brings us face to face, not with God, but with our forgetfulness vis a vis God" (1999: 221). And with the figure of the "adieu," central to his reading of Levinas and Derrida, de Vries signals the self-deconstructing character of theology as a discursive movement that is always both toward (in search of) God (a dieu) and, in a gesture that is both scruple and betrayal (as well as a certain arrival), away from God {adieu).

Intensities: Trauma as Revelation

Singularities are disruptive. We make sense of ourselves and our world by organizing, narrowing, classifying, and excluding. We construct and maintain our identities - as selves, as groups - in this way. But the "too much" of singularities resists our efforts to maintain clear boundaries, a resistance or disturbance of our identities that we generally defend ourselves against by asserting clear boundaries ever more strongly. Thus, for all three thinkers, singularity is traumatic and religion is a discourse of trauma. Santner is the clearest on this point. For him (8), trauma is the experience of the too much, of validity over meaning, offeree that cannot be meaningfully "metabolized" in consciousness. In the post-Freudian thinkers Santner follows, such as Lacan and Zizek, the paradigmatic trauma is understood to occur with the young child's entrance into symbolic life, a coming to selfhood in language. To become a self is to be "interpel- lated," impinged on by the "Other" of law/language. This trauma becomes the central point of our psychic life, a source of great energy and of "fantasy." Understood in the technical psychoanalytic sense (and somewhat coun- terintuitively), "fantasy" is a process by which the "too much" of trauma is "converged] into a support of social adaptation" (Santner: 33, 39-40). Fantasy, in other words, seeks escape from the "too much," domesticating it by identifying with socially dominant (ideological) modes of managing the world.

For Santner, "psychotheology" structures processes by which we face up to, rather than domesticate, the "too much." He defines psychoanalysis




as an "exposure to traumatism" and sees in Jewish Halakah a set of practices that cultivates a "form of life around the disruptive, even traumatic pressures induced in us by the 'neighbor-Thing'" (1 17).31 Psychotheology enables us to loosen the hold of ideology over us, to distance ourselves from our own identifications, and so to be more open to singularities, especially, as in Judaism, singularity in the form of the other person. Key for Santner here is the concept of "revelation," itself understood as inter- ruption, trauma, and interpellation. But unlike the trauma by which we come to establish our identities, in revelation we come to see ourselves as singular, as singled out by grace and love (Santner: 87-90). Revelation, thus, "unplugs" us, though only in a limited respect, from the "socially intelligible identities [that] locate us within an established set of social relations of production and exchange" (Santner: 87). It does this not by substituting a new identity for an old one but, rather, by disrupting identity, disorienting us in a way that productively unloosens the bonds of identification and ideology, opening us to the world and others in a way that is not constrained by our own fantasies, needs, and neuroses. As Santner puts it in a passage that summarizes the way I want to construe theology as a challenge to McCutcheon, revelation "is not so much the positing of an alternative and competing standard of value as an intervention into the very syntax by which values are determined and to which we are bound in our life with our values" (97, emphasis added).32

De Vries is after something similar in his account of Derrida's work on "hospitality" and "friendship." Each of these terms contains an imperative to create a particular kind of relationship, a "relation without relation," that is, a relation in which the surplus of the other is not assim- ilated to the known or the familiar but, rather, is "let be" in its strangeness. Accordingly, "friendship" for de Vries is the "index ... of an aporia" because it is both impossible (always caught between the necessity of relating to the other in terms of particular, identifiable characteristics and letting the other be) and imperative. In faith and friendship, the Other (God) and other become intertwined. De Vries glosses Derrida's hospitality as a "welcoming of the other as (the) totally Other, as the other in whose trace, transcendence, and dimension of height we find the sole access to - indeed, the very desire for and fear of- God" (2002: 301).

31 In other words, note Santner's description of "the passionate and often enigmatic insistence of what is singular about the other" (91).

Santner writes that the idea of "unplugging" was "the key to Rosenzwieg's critique of historicism and the false ideology of progress with which it can be associated" (63). Here, I can only point to Santner's claims and cannot adequately defend them. To do so will be the primary goal of my piece entitled "Ideology," which will explore not only Santner's "unplugging" but also de Vries's (1999: 147, 168; 2002: 294, 329) concept of "reverse implication."




Theology as Minor Literature

Theology as a discourse of singularity enables us, though never in any final way, to detach ourselves from "our socially intelligible identities." For Winquist, theology places "images, words and phrases ... in contestation in order to loosen the differential play of signs marking the surfaces of discourse" (1995: 94). 33 For de Vries, the study of religion needs to account for the way theological terms, tropes, and concepts continue to shape modern and postmodern ethical and political discourses. Such accounts would disrupt confident secularizing narratives and so reshape the field. He writes:

Even where the "religious" can no longer be identified as an integral and compelling system of belief - or, more indirectly, as a narratively con- structed way of life - it provides us with the critical terms, argumentative resources, and bold imaginary that is necessary for a successful analysis of contemporary culture. In other words, the study of religion must not only base itself on the latest findings of the empirical social sciences or on the most advanced conceptual tools provided by philosophical, literary, and cultural analysis. The critical terms of these disciplines must also be recast in light of the tradition they seek to comprehend. (2002: 326)

In sum, theology for Winquist, Santner, and de Vries is interruptive and critical rather than systematizing and stabilizing (a la Lincoln and McCutch- eon); it is no longer "queen of the sciences" or even a confession of faith but, rather, as Winquist puts it, with a nod to Deleuze on Kafka, a "minor literature" (1995: 128), an intervention that resists the totalizing and repressive tendencies of dominant discourses. As minor literature, theology shares with "critique" the effort to examine critically the bonds of ideology and identity from the perspective of a self-consciousness that recognizes the futility of searching for an identity free of such bonds. But theology, unlike some versions of "critique," does not use such self-consciousness as a warrant for renouncing the thought of what Derrida calls "the impossible."

CONCLUSION

For McCutcheon, the scholar's task as "critic" is to identify and explain the strategies by which human beings obscure sociopolitical reality and thus create identity and value. McCutcheon acknowledges that one

33 Contrary to McCutcheon's insistence that we confine the study of religion to one scale - the

naturalistic-historical - for Winquist (1998a: 541) it is necessary to work in multiple registers of

thought.




cannot engage in critique from a position outside particular discourses and identities, but he constantly defers any discussion of his own ideological commitments.34 Rhetorically - even as he acknowledges that he, like everyone else, is socially located - his writing expresses a particularly modern confidence in our ability to keep analytic and normative tasks separate. This separation, in turn, allows him to argue for the institutional separation of the study of religion and theology. The task of meaning creation, for McCutcheon (1997: x), even the task of asking whether there is "meaning to life," belongs outside the university. In this respect McCutcheon seems quite close to Donald Wiebe's modernist interest in disinterestedness or to the perspective shared by Gary Lease and Ivan Strenski in which the university is viewed simply as a place for knowledge and its "constant revision" and not "ideology" or "the preaching of a message."

I do not wish to contest, at least in any simple or obvious way, the idea that the university is, above all, about knowledge and that some kinds of "preaching" are out of place there. Nor would I suggest that there are not valuable scholarly and pedagogical heuristics available that enable us to make useful distinctions between dogmatic statements of value or belief and the critical examination of ideas and values. But to put these issues as simply as they appear in the work of the scholars who have been my focus here is to ignore at least two crucial issues. First, do we all agree on the goals of the university? Whose university is about "knowledge" and not "preaching"? Martha Nussbaum argues that a primary goal of higher education is the cultivation of "citizenship." And for her (1997: 111) this means the cultivation not just of our critical capacities but of our imaginative ones as well. The mission statement of my own institution, a private liberal arts college, states that we seek to educate students for "the honorable discharge of the duties of life" and that knowledge, while good for its own sake, is also to be pursued for the "intellectual, moral, and physical well-being of individuals and of society at large."35 There are numerous questions at stake here. For instance, What is the difference

34 Both Paul Griffiths and William Arnal have challenged McCutcheon on this score, and it is revealing that, in both cases, McCutcheon's published replies continue the avoidance of such discussion. McCutcheon rejects any substantive discussion of Griffiths's criticisms because, he says, Griffiths's criticisms are condescending. Perhaps this is so (though McCutcheon himself is by no means innocent of the kind of rhetoric he complains about in Griffiths, as one can see in his [2001: 105, 120] comparison of Garrett Green to Ann Elk of Monty Python fame). More important, though, is the fact that even if we do not agree with Griffiths that "everything is theology," he does raise issues to which McCutcheon should - but does not seem to - hold himself accountable, e.g., whether McCutcheon's argument that scholars of religion should use "one final vocabulary" is a normative one (Griffiths 1998b: 46) and whether a scholar committed only to historicizing can avoid all claims about "transhistorical, unverifiable matters of fact or value" (Griffiths 1998b: 48).

See the Grinnell College website: www.grinnell.edu/offices/president/missionstatement.




between an academic's roles as researcher and as educator? What are the pertinent differences between private and public institutions? It is by no means clear to me that anyone has given us answers to such questions that are not the subject of much debate.

We also must not ignore questions about the value of the pursuit of knowledge. Why explain religion? Why uncover the ideological pretensions of religious people? Without efforts to answer these kinds of questions, explanation and the search for knowledge simply result in the kind of sterile historicism criticized by Nietzsche as "hostile and dangerous to life" (83) or in a kind of "negative hermeneutics" that even McCutcheon's historicizing hero Frederic Jameson rejects. It is directly to the point that I am raising here that although the Marxist Jameson is no friend of theology, he nonetheless attempts to discern between liberating and alienating ideologies by identifying the Utopian moment of ideologies and, as Hayden White puts it, recognizes "the validity of the socially liberating impulse of both romance and the myths of the redemptive religions since time immemorial" (155).

A major reason I am suggesting that the "theology" I discuss above provides a richer form of critique than McCutcheon's is that, in complex ways, it explicitly links ethics and knowledge. Or, as Santner puts it, it "span[s] the divide between the sciences of symbolic identity and an ethics of singularity" (28). I suspect that one reason for the intellectual "turn to religion" - in postmodern, especially phenomenological, philosophy but also in political and psychoanalytic theory - is that theology, even in more traditional forms, engages in something like ideology critique, but only at the same time that it holds to (and criticizes) commitments and values that it knows are fallible and inadequate. To the extent that it holds to what I take to be the self-deconstructive imperative imposed by the name "God" (and, admittedly, there is much theology that does not do this), theology may be able to teach us something about how we can hold together our values and our knowledges in a relationship of mutual exposure.

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exposure and explanation: on the new protectionism in the study of religion

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