Religion as the Transmission of An Authoritative Tradition
The Significance of Timothy Fitzgerald’s Critique of Religious Studies for a Socially Embedded Definition of Religion
Keywords:
working definition, authority, tradition, transmission, non-theological, identifiable communities, ownership of knowledgeAbstract
Timothy Fitzgerald’s critique of the category “religion” was based on two main objections: the study of religion as a distinct discipline has grown out of the historical collusion with colonial interests that has culminated in the modern division between religion and the secular; by associating the term “religion” with sacred entities, theological assumptions have been smuggled into so-called scientific studies of religion. In this paper, I offer my own non-theological, sociocultural working definition of religion in an effort to separate “the sacred” from “religion.” I argue that religion consists of identifiable communities that adhere to traditions that are transmitted from generation to generation with an overwhelming authority. I conclude that Fitzgerald’s critique of religion does not require scholars to abandon the category, but to re-think how they use the academic findings they have extracted from their research subjects. To advance beyond Fitzgerald’s argument, I contend that academics need to work collaboratively with the religious communities they are researching by acknowledging them as the legitimate owners of the knowledge that is embedded in their authoritative traditions.
References
Capps, Walter H. 1995. Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.
Cox, James L. 1992. Expressing the Sacred. An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion. Harare: University of Zimbabwe.
———. 2004. “Afterword. Separating religion from the ‘sacred’: methodological agnosticism and the future of religious studies.” In Religion: Empirical Studies, edited by Steven J. Sutcliffe, 259–264. Aldershot: Ashgate.
———. 2006. A Guide to the Phenomenology of Religion. Key Figures, Formative Influences and Subsequent debates. London: Continuum.
———. 2015. “Religious memory as a conveyor of authoritative tradition: the necessary and essential component in a definition of religion.” Journal of the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions 2(1): 5–23.
———. 2018. Restoring the Chain of Memory. T.G.H Strehlow and the Repatriation of Australian Indigenous Knowledge. Sheffield: Equinox.
Eliade, Mircea. 1987. The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt.
Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2000. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2007a. Discourse on Civility and Barbarity. A Critical History of Religion and Related Categories. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
——— 2007b. “Encompassing Religion, Privatized Religions and the Invention of Modern Politics.” In Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formations, edited by Timothy Fitzgerald, 211–240. Sheffield: Equinox.
———. 2017. “The Ideology of Religious Studies Revisited: The Problem with Politics.” In Method and Theory in the Study of Religion: Working Papers from Hannover, edited by Steffen Führding, 124–152. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004347878_008
Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1999. “Religion as Memory. Reference to Tradition and the Constitution of a Heritage of Belief in Modern Societies.” In The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests, edited by Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk, 73–92. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004379091_009
———. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Translated by Simon Lee. Cambridge: Polity.
Leeuw, Gerardus van der. 1938. Religion in Essence and Manifestation. Translated by J.E. Turner. London: Allen and Unwin.
Piracha, Awais, Helena Onnudottir and Kevin Dunn. 2016. “Urban-Rural geographies of Aboriginal religious and non-religious identification.” In Religion and Non-Religion among Australian Aboriginal Peoples, edited by James L. Cox and Adam Possamai, 47–64. Abingdon: Routledge.
Platvoet, Jan G. 1999. “To Define or Not to Define. The Problem of the Definition of Religion.” In The Pragmatics of Defining Religion: Contexts, Concepts and Contests, edited by Jan G. Platvoet and Arie L. Molendijk, 245–265. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004379091_018
———. 2002. “Pillars, pluralism and secularisation: a social history of Dutch sciences of religion.” In Modern Societies and the Sciences of Religions, edited by G. Wiegers, 83–148. Leiden: Brill.
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1964. The Meaning and End of Religion. A new approach to the religious traditions of mankind. New York: Mentor.
