extracting the paradigm—ouch!

Extracting the ParadigmOuch!1

Catherine BellEmeritus Professor of Religious Studies,

Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053-0335, [email protected]

Abstract Masuzawas study unearths the founding genealogy of the study of religion, most pointedly the ubiquitous world religions paradigm that shaped the study and teaching of religion well into our era. She reveals more self-conscious European agendas than those familiar from post-colonial research. Th e paradigms that e ectively constructed the eld of religious studies have now locked it into costly and contentious projects of divestment. Adding to Masuzawas achievement by brie y assessing some other nested assumptionsbeginning with Christianity as the prototype for the category of religion itselfthis response intends to contribute to her project of historiciz-ing our scholarly sensibilities.

Keywords Masuzawa; study of religion; world religions; paradigms

Tomoko Masuzawas Th e Invention of World Religions (2005) begins what I have long thought was a next step for the eldto explore the key paradigms that have been, and still often are, basic to understandings of religion. Th is was not, of course, the specic task that drove Professor Masuzawa in her enterprise; she credits a fascination with the workings of European thought in its more formative stages of thinking about religion. What she turned up is a more complicated, and revealing, tale than an analysis of the world religion model in the history of the eld could be, no matter how useful. Even if her target was not the analysis of paradigms in the eld, she has done the most time-consuming ne hand-work in archeologically unearthing nineteenth-century uses of the term and the contexts for those uses. Safe to say, her

1 Portions of this response were rst presented at the journal History and Th eorys conference on religion, November 2005 at Wesleyan University, and subsequently published in that journal, vol. 45, no. 4 (December 2006): 27-46.

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/157006808X283534

Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 114-124

METHOD THEORY in theSTUDY OFRELIGION

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C. Bell / Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 114-124 115

revelations are more than we wanted to know; they leave me with some diges-tion problems.

I am using the term paradigm in a neutral senseas something that by its very nature serves as a tool for advancing a cultural body of knowledge until there is a growing sense that it is beginning to yield less, perhaps even spinning in circles. From this perspective, to call something a paradigm is to recognize it as a type of black box or a complex knot of ideas operative in our dis-course. Th e many paradigms in the study of religion, and doubtless in other elds as well, appear to interact like a set of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls, always another within the last. One might also think of them as geological or archeological strata, as long as it is kept in mind that nothing is ever really left behind and forgotten; the resources of such paradigms continue to be available to the eld of study they helped create. Yet in regard to any one paradigm, we might well begin to inquire why it is there and, more boldly, just how and why it is so useful to us? Such questions point to the clear irony involved in para-digms: they are the building blocks for systems of knowledge until we actually perceive the degree to which we are depending on their support.

Th e Invention of World Religions addresses one of the most basic, hard-work-ing paradigms in the eld, focusing, as I noted, minimally on its role in shap-ing the study of religion and more fully on what its early history reveals about the construction of European culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-ries. We know too well that it went on to America and entered every religious studies classroom here. Moreover, it has traveled out into the larger world and aected the way in which many people regard their own traditions. I was frus-trated at rst with the book because it did not track these recent eects. I admit that I wanted someone to embarrass those who cling to Huston Smiths textbook, perhaps even Smith himself whose royalties for that book are the sort of thing one begins to envy after two decades in the eld. Too often a col-league has poked a head into my oce to ask whats a good book for teaching world religions? Im doing something at night at the local community college. When my answer looked to grow beyond the eighteen words in the query, the colleague was likely to interrupt with professional rudeness, saying: Th anks, got to run, thats helpful, but I will probably stick with Huston Smith, which I think they already ordered anyway.

But petty grudges aside, my conviction that history of religions needs to understand how it has been eected and aected by this European-born para-digm is my rationale for talking about Th e Invention of World Religions in an imposed context of my own. I may well have read the book with my mind on the history of religion paradigms. For example, a basic yet still arbitrary starting point would the paradigm I have entitled Christianity as the Prototype. Th is

116 C. Bell / Method and Th eory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008) 114-124

black box was slowly assembled through the ascendancy of Christianity in Europe and its subsequent diusion by missionaries, travelers, and a variety of military and cultural colonizers. It was only natural for Christianity to be taken up by scholars in the European cultural milieu as their frame of refer-ence for understanding religion; that is, it became the prototype for religion in general, an idea that also needed to emerge historically as a working cate-gory. As a conscious and unconscious prototype, Christianity seemed to pro-vide all the assumptions scholars needed to begin to address dierent religious cultures. It was the major tool used to encompass, understand, and dominate the multiplicity that became more evident and immediate.

Yet history contains more in this box. Insofar as Christianity has been sub-ject to processes of dissemination and appropriation (or inculturation, to use Christian language), a great many Christianities were created. While some have been lost to history, others are simply understudiedas Pagels (1980), Jenkins (2002), Ehrman (2003), Sanneh (1989) and even Palmer (2001) have told us lately. Either way, the history of Christianity was never as neat as the model suggests. Nonetheless, practiced by reservation Sioux, Russian Ortho-dox, or the Independent Churches of South Africa, there is evidence that the Christian prototype for religion-in-general has been very successful in the eld, so to speak, and it is probably not likely to change soon in the academydespite tensions accruing around colonial legacies. For example, Chinese and Japanese of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries would frequently reply that they did not have any religion because what they did have seemed totally unlike the model presented by Christian missionaries (Yang 1961). Th ese days, however, many Chinese and Japanese have come to be aliated with religions that are close to the Christian model. Lamin Sanneh argues that the dramatic spread of evangelical Christianity, even in African nations that threw out colonial powers and all they represented, is associated with those countries where the Bible was translated into the local language(s), allowing the reformulation of traditional deities with the roles played by God and Christ among others in Christian story (Sanneh 1989).

I had an opportunity to discuss the Christian prototype problem with a bright young religion scholar who carried a modern global personal historyborn Chinese in Taiwan, BA to PhD from UCLA, seeking work in the USA, and an ordained minister in a fast-growing Buddhist Th eravada sectalthough he showed little interest in discussing this complex identity. Of course, he had no alternative models other than those contained in the standard scholarly language that determines admittance into the academic community; more-over, he had also absorbed the Christian paradigm on a personalized level through the explicit modernization eorts of his sects nineteenth-century scholar-founder as these were explained to me.


You might ask about Judaism and Islam, both notably active through the full length of European history. Yet both were eectively muted by being given a consistent niche in the dominant Christian cosmology. Judaism was easily demoted to those who refused to accept the truth, even though the shared textual base was a point of commonality in terms of which the failure to be Christian cost even more. Islam, as the barbarian at the gate, was cast as the threat that dened both the physical and psychological borders of Christen-dom. Th ese alternatives to practicing Christianity had no aect on the Chris-tian prototype, although history surely contains scholars who explored Judaism or Islam in something like their own terms.

Opening up the paradigm of Christianity as the prototype reveals another black box, this one dening religion in terms of the historical travails of Chris-tianity in Europe. I call this second paradigm Religion as the Irrational. Th e Enlightenment was responsible for many cultural shifts, but for my narrow purposes, let me simply note how it amended the previous paradigm with a fully developed concept and terminology for the more generic idea of reli-gion in itself. Tomoko notes that the putative author of Th e Travels of Marco Polo (1275-92), written during the ascendancy of Christianity in Europe, well before the stirrings of the Enlightenment, used only four categories with which to classify all the peoples he metone was either a Christian, Jew, Moor (Sar-acen), or pagan. Polos book refers to the stereotypes associated with each of these categories, which were so entrenched that he gives several paragraphs to his utter surprise that idolaters like the Chinese could so surpass other nations in the excellence of their manners and their knowledge of many sub-jects (Polo 1958, 160).

Th e Enlightenments separation of church and state, on top of Europes growing knowledge about other religious cultures (e.g., Jesuits writing home with their version of a rationalized Confucianism), aided the standardization of religion as a common term in popular parlance. Even though Christianity as a religion structured the very idea of religion itself, the term religion did recognize that there were totally non-Christian religions abroad (Preus 1987). I think this argument will survive even Rodney Starks most recent radical reinterpretation of the role of Christianity as the source of the rational and scientic sensibilities of Europe (Stark 2005). More widely attested, the search by the scholars of the seventeenth century for a truly rational religion, intended to look nothing like Christianity, inadvertently recreated the latter in its understanding of morality minus distinctly Christian-Greek metaphysics (Spence 1969, 1984; Mungello 1999).

It was, therefore, the empirical sciences in conjunction with the development of an objectication of religion that created the environment for the modern study of religion, religion as the natural object of study for the rational


sciences of man. Indeed, the interplay of the rational and irrational in denitions of the sciences of religion led to the various forms of comparative religion still practiced today. Th e Invention of World Religions came out just over a year after another book, a textbook in the tradition of world religions textbooks, namely, Mark Juergensmeyers Global Religions (2003). If Tomokos book traces debates about the scientic, or ideological, value of the category and nds a chunk of historical complexity, Juergensmeyers introductory chapter sees a simpler story. In the twentieth century, comparative religion included that scholar of the arcane, Mircea Eliade, grouped with Joseph Campbell and his use of Carl Jung, Huston Smiths attempts to discern a perennial philosophy, and Wilfred Cantwell Smiths proposal for a world the-ology. In Juergensmeyers account, Ninian Smart emerges as one of the founders of the modern eld of religious studies with a positive vision for a truly comparative study of religions. Th e content of the book is clear: the global dimensions of religions in the modern world are likely to be invisible to us if we approach them through the traditional world religions model. Yet Juergensmeyer did not have the tools to organize the book much dierently; he would have written a dierent account of the categories with which to address these religions if Th e Invention of World Religions could have helped him deal with the underlying problem of seeing globalization.2

Both Juergensmeyer and Masuzawa describe eighteenth- to twentieth-cen-tury seekers after the universal, scholars who might have been able to use the new world religions idea to displace Christianity as the prototypical religion for comparative purposes, but were not able to imagine that project. In the end, that other paradigm of irrational religions open to rational study also did not displace the Christian prototype, but did introduce a rudimentary egali-tarianism and the mirage of relativism among the diversity of religions identied.

Historically, one group of scholars was alert to the unenlightened primitive still within Christianity (e.g., Robertson Smith), while another focused on the Christian mysteries hidden in the historical experience of pagans (e.g., the Jesuits in China). For others, the quest for universal laws behind the variety of religionslike the quest for the lost city of the pharaohspromised a key to

2 Juergensmeyer might also have read the nal chapter of Robert A. Orsi (2005), which analyses the historical context that shaped this approach to the study of religion and nds it severely hampered by its adoption of a moral agenda: As the colonial period came to a close, scholars proposed a broadly inclusive, universal religion of man as the goal of both the study and the practice of religions, aspiring to gather the worlds many dierent traditions into a single, global narrative of the progressive revelation of the Christian God (Orsi 2005, 189).


a timeless sacred.3 Within all these eorts, the Christian paradigm would not be shaken until much later, when Zen became a familiar religious idiom in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars who followed romantic Hegelianism, like Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) and his student, Ernest Troeltsh (1865-1935), argued, like so many before them, that Christianity was the fulllment of his-tory. Even Eliade, in the middle of the twentieth century but still early in his career, suggested that one would nd in Christianity the most logical and fullling development of the symbolism of the divine expressed in all other religions (Eliade 1954, 159-62). Th us, Christianity as the perfection of the notion of religion found new ways to triumph even within the innovative context of religion subjected to the rational study of (scientic?) scholars.

Th e two paradigms, Christianity as the prototype and religion as the irrational (to be studied), logically invoke a third, the one Tomoko has historically parsed. Although she shows that its roots were thoroughly European, we know that it has been an extraordinarily popular formulation in America. It is prob-ably the way most Americans are introduced to religious multiplicity and, therefore, to what are seen as the common elements of religion. Indeed, the t of Masuzawas analysis encourages me to eld a few less learned ideas about the American use of the model today. While the popularity of the world reli-gions paradigm among teachers undoubtedly rests on many factors, its ability to solve perceived problems of cultural-centrism is certainly one of them. World religions models appear to invoke a limited sense of equality, especially if the list does not leave o indigenous religions or such major cultural forces in the twentieth century as Confucianism and Shinto. Th erefore, the model enables a teacher to introduce students to a great deal of material in a way that minimizes traditional suspicions and prejudices. Setting up the similarities for an array of world religionswhether ve or fteencan make the strange less strange; it can, moreover, give a recognized place to almost all comers to the American classroom. When done well, the model can also invite eective dis-cussions about ideas and structures, the fruits of comparison in any eld.

Yet Masuzawas analysis shows that the model always involved a few major problems, such as the leveling implied in the egalitarian enterprise of mak-ing each religion resemble the others. Although some traditions, represented by their more liberal members, are comfortable with this approach, some are notsuch as conservative Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, and Sunni Muslims, to name just a few of the communities with exclusivist

3 See Rodney Stark (2000, 4-6) for a witty, but wildly exaggerated argument, about the prim-itive in Christianity. Much of Starks characterization of the history of religious studies scholar-ship as centered on a critique of Christianity is indebted to Preus (1991).


claims. Another problem also emerges from this leveling: such formulations make each religion t an explicit simplication of the (Christian) prototype in order to demonstrate that religionsso similar in their basicsmust be true in some very human or deeply spiritual way. Th e aura of comparable qualities is, of course, historically and theologically misleading for any one of the reli-gions described. What about those not included on the list? Are they not large enough or religion enough, or does the t fail to atter the prototype?

Th ese were certainly the questions that worried me this past year when Hans Kung, the Catholic theologian and dedicated spokesperson for a global ethic, came to speak at a conference on campus. He insisted on bringing with him his World ReligionsUniversal PeaceGlobal Ethic exhibition, a set of large handsome panels, each addressing a world religion.4 Each religion is given a distinctive symbol, a recognizable photograph of one of its holy places, and a list of basic facts (such as the founder or rough equivalent), the main ideas, creeds, or ritual obligations. Th e overall eect is to demonstrate a fun-damental unity in the natural structure of religion as exemplied by these major examples.

However, Kungs panels were drawn into an totally unrelated lecture series sponsored by the Local Religion, Global Relationships project of the Reli-gious Studies Department at Santa Clara University, a program that studies the multitude of religious communities in Silicon Valley. Th e Project was hav-ing the rst lecture series in which local religious leaders came to campus to speak for themselves about their communities and how they dealt with the pluralism of the valley. Th e opening reception needed to be held in the room displaying six of Kungs World Religions panelsmuch to my dismay. At least I thought I could ask some of the local leaders how they felt about the level-ing imposed by the way the panels presented their traditions (actually, I had to deputize an assistant for the rst event). Unexpectedly, their answers were all versions of no problem! Th ey were glad to be represented at allalthough whether that meant glad to be among the six or glad to be represented at a Catholic university was not clear. Th e fact that Christianity was there as only one panel among the six was mentioned as refreshing, but they found no signicant fault with the information displayed; indeed they had presented their traditions to the university audience in decidedly simplied terms that

4 Th e exhibit is sponsored by the Global Ethic Foundation at Tbingen. A descriptive bro-chure was published in 2000 (trans. John Bowken), but the Foundation is the result of a pro-grammatic book entitled Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic, published by Kung in 1990. While there are twelve panels in all, only six were shipped for this occasion.


were more like the content of the panels than not. In the end, the world reli-gions approach, mused a Native American Indian shaman who spoke last in the series, could be seen as a victory in view of the ubiquitous dominance of Christianityif ones religion was included.

So views about this over-worked model dier: there is the popular peda-gogical tool that some teachers think does more good than harm; add the eye-rolling model of analytic inadequacy among religion scholars; and do not leave out politely positive assessments by community representatives who may or may not use it with their own communities, but would exert some pressure to have their tradition included among those so represented.

Masuzawa notes the limited attention given to analyzing this work-horse of the disciplines pedagogy. In 1962 Wilfred Cantwell Smith called attention to the inherently poor t provided by the term religion when it is taken out of the West and applied to the pre-modern versions of the traditions of the East; he saw its use as form of disrespect typical of the Wests willingness to invent names (and jurisdictions) that did not correspond at all to how the designated communities identied themselves (Smith 1962, 1-14). Only recently did Jonathan Z. Smith address the history and classication diculties behind the world religions systemproviding a deconstruction of its use within the discipline, for which Invention of World Religions has supplied the historical roots in persons and issues (Smith 2004, 160-78, esp. 166-73). Yet the book goes on to give us something quite unexpected when it uncovers the most ideological context in which the model played out a number of roles as well as the continuity of its immediate meaning. Religion, Masuzawa sugges-tions, was the embodiment of a Christian cultures concern with its Semitic origins when an Aryan heritage was thought to be so much more attractive. Th is is the sort of unexpected historical chapter that justies a careful reading of the book.

It would require yet another book to begin to trace some of the ways in which this paradigm, like Saids analysis of the ideology of orientalism, aected the cultures caught in its reasoning.

My own paradigm project goes on to identify several more boxes within these boxes: such as the Cultural Necessity of Religion paradigm that was eshed out by those theoristsDurkheim, Freud, and Marx, among otherswhose approach constitutes, in Preuss analysis, a major shift from theories of origin to theories of religions continuation in the modern world. Yet the addi-tion of this new layer generated another paradigm: Religion Deconstructed. Th is last one not only contains some insight into the prototypical role played by Christianity, it also suggests that religion might no longer be relevant as a marker for any valid form of cultural dierence, an idea that could alone


undermine the usefulness of world religions systems outside the self-imposed demands of our classrooms. Yet the paradigm of religions necessity is strug-gling to dominate the deconstruction of religion. So far the tension among these paradigms is maintaining a quiet conviction in the academy that religion should be socially respected in a diverse society, and treated as if it is probably good for us all. Th is last position may have helped maintain public support for programs to study religion; it has certainly helped deconstructionists feel properly radical in their acts of critique.

However, this bland view of religion has handicapped and censored scholars in ways that become less visible the longer one works in the eld. While vari-ous people have decried aspects of our drugged style of blank assentsuch as J. Z. Smiths urging the study of religions we dont like (e.g., Jim Joness Peoples Temple) and probably even the critical mantra that theology still mars the study of religionit was recently pegged precisely, if all too briey by Robert Orsi, in the closing pages of Between Heaven and Earth. Picking up just the tail end of his argument, all of these paradigms enable, or coerce, us into assuming that religion (in some vague liberal Protestant form) is basically good. It does not allow us to explore all the boundary crossing contradic-tions that actually make up the real religious worlds we come from and can visit. It enables us to suspend judgment indenitely for the sake of objectivity, while imposing a full agenda of moral rules without having to account for them (Orsi 2005, 186-99).

Masuzawas analysis of the construction (and persistence?) of the world reli-gions paradigm appreciateseven if she did not have room to complete the full circlethat such created categories go on to have a life of their own, often shaping the realities they were so poorly describing. So my community leaders are comfortable with the misreadings that have by now reshaped aspects of their traditions. Th is result may be tied to Invention of World Religions appre-ciation of the inadequacy of Jonathan Z. Smiths famous claim that Religion is solely the creation of the scholars study (1982, 13). If religion was ever simply a homunculus alchemically concocted to our specications within the scholars study, it has since escaped that room to hang out with people linked by a global system of communication, nance, and the imposition of catego-ries in lieu of the rise of truly transcultural ones. Many global communities readily relate to their own particular description as a world religion, and they quickly start to compare the numbers of practitioners claimed by rival tradi-tions as reported the annual almanac statistics for world religions.

As scholars and teachers we are trying to nd our place in the current wave of reconstructing (or reviving) the study of religion. We know we are working within paradigms that made the eld possible, and we know some of them


need to be retired even at the cost of a broad sharing of disciplinary assump-tions. Bob Orsi, a very distinct stylist, describes several models for addressing the study of religion today, but notes: Th e job of critical self-reection and historical awareness incumbent on all scholars of religion is precisely to uncover the ways that their particular areas of inquiry . . . have been caught up in the political history of the Western study of religion in order to begin to the work of freeing themselves from it (Orsi 2004, 3). I cannot think of a better description of the project of Th e Invention of World Religions. Masuzawa wor-ries about the political assumptions from which we have not freed ourselves, and perhaps she worries to the point of standing back from the eld, a luxury her appointments allow her. She is a Cassandra warning us to feel insecure. But in the process of worrying and working slowly in dusty archives aban-doned by everyone else, she contributes an elegant and demanding demon-stration of where the study of religion needs to be.

References

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extracting the paradigm—ouch!

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