mccutcheon, scholar as public intellectual

Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65/2

AAR ESSAY

A Default of Critical Intelligence ?The Scholar of Religion as Public Intellectual1

Russell T. McCutcheon

The moment you publish essays in a society you have entered politicallife; so if you want not to be political do not write essays or speak out.—Edward Said (110)To exist socially is to be rhetorically aligned. It is the function of the intel-lectual as critical rhetor to uncover, bring to light, and probe all suchalignments. This is part of the work of ideological analysis.—Frank Lentricchia (149)The historian of religion cannot suspend his critical faculties, his capacityfor disbelief, simply because the materials are "primitive" or religious.—Jonathan Z. Smith (1982:60)

1. INTRODUCTION

What is the role of religion in public life? This is the common questionasked in a number of books that have recently appeared (see, among

Russell T. McCutcheon is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Southwest Missouri StateUniversity, Springfield, MO 65804 (email: [email protected]).

1 My thanks to Willi Braun of Bishop's University, Quebec, Tim Murphy of the University of Cali-fornia at Santa Cruz, and Predrag Klasnja of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for ongoing con-versations on the role of the public intellectual and for their helpful comments on an earlier draft ofthis paper. Also, I am indebted to JAAR's reviewer for her/his constructive comments and suggestions.

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others, Cady, Carter, Dean, and Marsden). Virtually all of their answersinvolve an increased role for "faith" and even theology in the intellectual,social, economic, and political affairs of the state. Most often, the destabi-lizations of objectivity and science brought about by postmodern cri-tiques are the means by which these writers return this religiouscommitment to public life. As George Marsden argues, given that "manyof the original reasons" for excluding religious faith from the academyand matters of public concern have, along with other Enlightenmentnotions, recently come under severe critique, "is it now time to reconsiderthe rules that shape the most respected academic communities?" (8-9, seealso his widely cited "Concluding Unscientific Postscript," 429-440).Because the question of religion's role in matters of public concern isclearly of relevance to such theologically inclined commentators on civillife, some readers may wonder precisely why such books ought to attractthe attention of the scholar of religion. In other words, what does thisrecent spate of books have to do with the academic study of religion?

Books on the resurgent role of religious commitment in public lifeought to attract the interest of the scholar of religion precisely becausethey are evidence of our failure as public intellectuals. Outside of a smallnumber of readers and writers, few members of our own society—andfew members of the academy—know what we do or know who we are, letalone are influenced in their public decisions by our scholarship. Whenone examines the books written by those who advocate an increased rolefor religious commitment (most often this turns out to be a particulartype of Protestant Christian commitment) in the affairs of a nation, it isas if the academic study of religion—even its earlier incarnation as com-parative religion—had never existed or made any significant contributionto the human sciences. It is as if we had nothing to add to public affairswhatsoever and that theologians are the only commentators on "religion"who have a role to play in helping to decide issues of law, justice, andsocial welfare.

Given the tools that scholars of religion routinely employ in their wide-ranging studies, I believe that we have a vital role to play in public affairs,but it is a role that is rather different from the one championed by manycurrent writers. This essay is therefore an attempt to outline some of thereasons for our failure as public intellectuals and to argue for a differentrole for the scholar of religion as public intellectual.

2. A PROBLEM OF OUR OWN MAKING?

In my reading, the very question, "What is the role of religion in publiclife?" has so far been the almost exclusive territory of self-identified reli-gious people staking out claims on how their insights into the ways in

McCutcheon: A Default of Critical Intelligence? 445

which nations ought to work can be put into practice. What we shouldnote from the outset is that the very phrasing of the question already pre-sumes that the issue of what exactly religion is has already been settled; forvirtually no one in this.debate presumes that religion is the result of alien-ation from socio-economic relations (Marx and Engels), that religion is anillusory practice of wish fulfillment (Freud), that religious practices andstories symbolically deny the contingency and transience of life andhuman institutions (Bloch), that religion is but one species of anthropo-morphism (Guthrie), or that religion is but an evolutionary developedmechanism (Burkert). If any of these alternative options were seriouslyentertained, then undoubtedly many people would argue that religionmust be kept far from the mechanisms whereby decisions in a culturally,economically, and technologically diverse/complex nation are made. Itshould be apparent, then, that this unarticulated consensus concerning theself-evidently positive and enriching role that religious commitment canplay in political affairs betrays the silence of scholars of religion—a silencethat I believe is self-inflicted. So, the question posed at the outset of thisessay, "What is the role of religion in public life?" might better be phrased,"What is, or can be, the role of the scholar of religion in public life?"

What I am suggesting is that unlike Stephen Carter's thesis that so-called elite, liberal, and secular society has actively trivialized and margin-alized those with a religiously inspired viewpoint, it is actually scholars ofreligion in their very conception of both their datum and themselves whohave trivialized and marginalized both themselves and their own socialcontributions. The methods previously mentioned (phenomenology andhermeneutics), which happen to be the primary means by which our fieldwas established as institutionally autonomous in the first place, are directlyimplicated in the absence of critical intelligence in the field. In their insis-tence that religion is comprised of sui generis, non-falsifiable meaningderived from a private experience of mystery, awe, power, or the sacredthat can only be redescribed, intuited, felt, and understood by the outsider,scholars of religion have, to borrow Smith's words cited at the outset of thisessay, suspended their own critical faculties and their capacity for disbelief.By so doing they have created sufficient conditions for their own politicalmalignment and cultural silence in contemporary public debates. Ironi-cally perhaps, our almost exclusive reliance on the phenomenological andhermeneutical methods as the means for securing our intellectual andinstitutional turf have ensured that scholars of religion have no voice in thepublic forum.

In constructing a field solely concerned with getting to the deep core,the kernel, or the ahistorical essence we may have argued ourselves out ofbusiness when it comes to developing critical commentary on the mech-anisms whereby privileges are bestowed, revoked, and contested in our


own society. Although we may have gained personal enlightenmentthrough the use of our hermeneutical skills, as Joseph Campbell andMircea Eliade advocated,2 we end up like the solitary renunciant; we haveforgone our name and identity, we do not really have a way of putting itall into words, or of communicating anything to our fellows, for we havetaken refuge from the society in which we live. As Catherine Albanese hasrightly observed, "scholars of religion . . . find in the mental worlds theycreate and construct a refuge and safe haven from the general assaults ofchange that comes with time's passing" (222; emphasis added). It is inconstructing just such a "safe haven" that we find evidence of our com-plicity with power.

3. THE ESSENTIAL MAKE-UP OF THINGS AND THESCHOLAR OF RELIGION

My claim concerning the self-inflicted default of critical intelligencemay remind some of Carl Raschke's own criticism of the field (1986).Raschke argues that the spirit of relativism that he claims dominates thefield has led to a "fanatical pluralism" where the scholar of religion "fos-ters a rabid preoccupation with the pluralistic display of religious givensand psycho-subjective ephemera at the cost of more profound ontologi-cal probing and analysis" (135). Instead of simply describing a diversity ofreligious manifestations, he argues that we as scholars of religion "shouldbe able to make certain normative distinctions that reflect our commit-ment to discriminating analysis and critical intelligence" (136). Ourdefault of critical intelligence, then, is a refusal to accept the role of pro-viding "normative guidance" (137), a guidance that is fueled by our"ontological probing" and "normative distinctions," both of which arespecifically concerned with identifying such self-evident "aberrations ofreligious thinking and behavior" (136) as, for example, Jim Jones and theJonestown deaths or the rise of various religious cults. According toRaschke, then, our failure as public intellectuals is in not distinguishinggood from bad, or normal from abnormal, religion.

Although I agree with Raschke that critical intelligence in part consti-tutes "the ability and drive to penetrate beneath the mere surface ofthings," and, moreover, that our current institutional woes are of our ownmaking, I cannot support his insistence that the scholar of religion can"apperceive [the] . . . essential make-up" of things or that our task is todifferentiate "the valuable and enduring from the pernicious or inconse-

2 For, according to Campbell, our studies comprise an individual quest for personhood; accordingto Eliade, the history of religions is a spiritual technique meant to recover long camouflaged andarchaic cultural values.


quential, the veracious from the merely specious" (136). Accordingly,Raschke and I differ dramatically in our conception of the discursive lim-its in which scholarship on religion takes place. It is in light of this long-standing but misguided assumption that studying religion provides deep,essential, absolute, or otherworldly insights into the very nature of thingsthat scholars such as Raschke can argue that their scholarship providesnormative guidance for a society—this is the same claim made by Eliade'snew humanism. If anything, and this is indeed the ironic part, the unde-fended and indefensible assumption that there is, in fact, a real nature tothings that lurks beneath the surface is for me the primary instance of ourdefault of critical intelligence. Our ability "to penetrate beneath the meresurface of things" is nothing more than the ability to historicize all ahis-torical claims. For the scholar of religion as public intellectual what ismost intriguing is that many of our colleagues think there is such a thingas good or healthy religion as opposed to aberrations of religious thinkingand behavior. Contrary to this position, I would build on a Durkheimiantradition in arguing that religious discourses, which are neither good norbad, are simply a brute fact of social ideologies and rhetorics. Contrary toRaschke's recommendation, then, I see the default in critical intelligenceas being the unquestioned acceptance of deep, essential truths.

These may seem to be rather harsh words for a field that recently hasexperienced a number of department closings and threatened closings.Given the current budgetary issues facing administrations, both univer-sity and government, it would seem that the last thing on a scholar of reli-gion's mind would be to implicate his or her own field as beingresponsible for the current problems. After all, "he that troubleth his ownhouse shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall be servant to the wise ofheart" (Proverbs 11:29). For yet others this may all sound like I amunjustly blaming the victim. Indeed, this would seem to be the ideal timeto circle the wagons, proclaim the important place—even ontologicalloadings—our work has in the modern university's humanities curricu-lum and, like Rudolf Otto or Paul Tillich, leave it up to the sheer self-evidency of our claims to sway our audience (an example of such anapologetic can be found in Ann Matter's defense of the study of religionat the University of Pennsylvania).3 By presuming both their datum andtheir work to have self-evident authority, relevance, and value, scholars ofreligion have evaded their social responsibility by side-stepping rational

' In the words of Warren Frisina: "Committed to the intrinsic value of our work, especially ourresearch, we continue to be 'productive' and hope that this intrinsic value will sustain us through dif-ficult t imes.. . . I am concerned that this option is the one taken most often by our colleagues" (inpress).


argumentation and persuasion; they may have thereby paved the way totheir own institutional decline. Sadly, we cannot have it both ways: thestudy of self-evidencies and intuitions need not be termed scholarshipand need not be funded by financially troubled governments.4

4. SCHOLARS OF RELIGION AS TRANSLATORS:OUR FAILURE OF CRITICAL NERVE

The absence of the scholar of religion from the ranks of public intellec-tual is, at least in part, the result of what Donald Wiebe (1984) aptlydescribed as a "failure of nerve." As I understand him, Wiebe was referringto the failure of scholars to carry through with critical, explanatory stud-ies of religion conceived as but one aspect of human cognitive, biological,cultural, and historical practices. Instead, Wiebe saw the field's turn fromthe earlier nineteenth-century attempts to found an explanatory scienceof religion based on theories of religion (exemplified in the work of suchscholars as F. Max Miiller and Cornelius P. Tiele), and toward the phe-nomenologically and hermeneutically-based approaches so dominanttoday, as a comparable failure of scholarly nerve. (For some of Wiebe'smore recent views on this problem, see 1994a and 1994b).

One of the implications of this failure of critical nerve is that scholarsof religion find themselves all but speechless when it comes to debatingthe so-called religious contributions to be made to making decisions ofrelevance to the public concern. To be sure, we can redescribe assortedclaims, translate back and forth between sides, try to interpret the some-times obscure claims made by one or another side in any given debate orcontroversy, and provide interesting historical and doctrinal context forunderstanding this or that insider viewpoint.5 Such is the job of a transla-tor or color commentator, a role that some in the field think shouldoccupy a greater amount of our time (e.g., see Judith Berling's, Martin

* At the November 1996 joint meeting of the SSSR and NAASR, a session entitled, "Late CapitalismArrives on Campus: Making and Remaking the Study of Religion," addressed this and other relatedtopics. The title and impetus for the panel arose from some of the writings of the literary critic CaryNelson. The papers from this joint NAASR/SSSR panel are forthcoming in the CSSR Bulletin.

5 Most recently Lawrence Sullivan has advocated just such a role: by noting that FBI agents involvedin the Branch Davidian stand-off failed to take "the role of religion seriously" and failed to take intoaccount the purely "religious motives" of the participants, Sullivan clearly favors the irreducible char-acter of religion and the scholar's role as a translator of essentially religious meaning. For reducingreligion to "non-religious terms—economic or psychological terms, for instance," according to Sulli-van, "trivializes religion by recasting religious motivations as essentially non-religious ones, translat-ing religious claims into languages of self-interest which are only political, economic, or psychologicalin nature. Waco and incidents like it indicate that this view may be misjudged" (230,231). However,without a clear understanding as to just what makes certain motives uniquely religious—and theabsence of any such explicit criteria in Sullivan's article suggests that the distinction must be self-evident—Sullivan's critique of reductionism falls short.


Marty's, and Robert Wilken's Presidential Addresses to the AAR6). Con-ceived essentially as an exercise either in nuanced descriptions or reflexiveautobiography, the study of religion has rarely amounted to more than areporter repeating the insider's unsubstantiated claims (all the whileinvoking methodological agnosticism as their justification for doing so).Such scholars must inevitably remain silent when it comes to matters ofexplanation and analysis. When it comes to deciding whether and to whatextent religious positions that claim ahistorical authority, wisdom, anddirection are useful in charting the course of a public school curriculum,a welfare agency, or even a policy for war, such translators have no voiceand little, if anything, to add.

5. POLITICAL MARGINALIZATION AND THE AUTONOMYOF RELIGION

It is not just that the methods we employ rule out our public involve-ment; as already suggested, the very manner in which religion is con-ceived already rules out our critical contributions. This is a matter oftheory. From the outset, religion is presumed to be diametrically opposedto, and is, in fact, the victim of, so-called secular issues such as politicsand economics. In other words, the sacred/profane dichotomy, which isitself one of the primary theoretical tools used to maintain the autonomyand privilege of religious authority, is part of the problem. Take, forexample, how religion is conceived by one prominent contributor to thesedebates, Stephen Carter: it is self-evidently personalistic, moralistic, andexperiential, and most definitely of the monotheistic variety (rarely dosocial systems outside of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam figure in thesedebates). "What does it mean," he asks, "to say that religious groupsshould be autonomous? It means, foremost, that they should not bebeholden to the secular world, that they should exist neither by the for-bearance of, nor to do the bidding of, the society outside of themselves"(34-35). Or, as Carter asserts a little later: "Religions are in effect indepen-dent centers of power"; religion is an "independent moral force" and "atits heart, a way of denying the authority of the rest of the world; it is a wayof saying to fellow human beings and to the state those fellow humanbeings have erected, 'No, I will not accede to your will'" (35, 39, 41). It ison the basis of such a suspect understanding of religion that Carterargues for the legal, institutional, and social autonomy—and thereforepublic authority—of organized religion in America.

' The role of translator is advocated in a surprising number of Presidential Addresses to the AAR. Fora critical survey of the history of the AAR and its Presidential Addresses, see Wiebe's two forthcomingessays, "Against Science in the Academic Study of Religion," and "Religious Agenda Continued."


Based on such a use of the religious/secular distinction, a distinctionthat fuels the exceedingly misleading notion of the "separation of churchand state," "religion" is construed as an independent variable occupyingthe untainted realm of pure and private moral insight opposed to, and thesalvation of, the messy public worlds of politics and economics. BurtonMack has rightly described the dilemma such scholars of religion face:

the usual approach to the definition of religious phenomena is... limited towhat moderns have imagined as the "sacred," or as reference to discrete "sub-cultural" systems of religion that take separate institutional forms. This wayof defining religion leaves out of account the arenas of discourse, practice,and display where a society's values and attitudes are regularly cultivated inthe "secular" realm. (30)

Much as an earlier generation of North American historians of religionsargued that because religion is sui generis sociologists and anthropolo-gists cannot adequately study it, so too writers such as Carter stake outan institutional and political turf through the deployment of strategiesof containment and isolation.7

However, such isolation, generated largely through issues of theory(religion is sui generis) and methodology (scholarship is translation),automatically excludes the scholar of religion from making a contribu-tion to larger issues of public concern, a point nicely articulated by Mack.If we follow the literary critic Terry Eagleton and at least in part define theintellectual as "somebody who trades in ideas by transgressing discursivefrontiers" (83), then such definitional and methodological autonomy—let alone the institutional autonomy scholars of religion require to survivein the university—effectively rule out all forms of transgressing, for theboundaries of just what is and what is not within the reach of the scholarof sui generis religion are quite clear (i.e., if there are no gods, no myths,no rituals, and no hierophanies, then it is hardly something about whichthe scholar of religion can have an informed opinion). As we all know,"the economics department is interested only in abstract models of a purefree enterprise economy; the political science department is concentrat-ing on voting patterns and electoral statistics; the anthropologists arestudying hill tribesmen in New Guinea; and the sociologists are studyingcrime in the ghetto" (Rai:138). And scholars of religion study and com-ment on the free-floating, sui generis, and sacred quality of private humanexperiences.

7 Documenting the many sites where the discourse on sui generis religion is reproduced is the aimof my book Manufacturing Religion.


The effect of such a rigid compartmentalization, characteristic of thedisciplinary, administrative, and funding structures of the modern uni-versity, is that certain transgressive questions, by definition, cannot beasked. This in turn prevents creative and oppositional scholarship; formoving across, between, and around disciplines means calling into ques-tion the rules by which we normally divide up, study, and understand"reality." Institutional as well as methodological containment and isola-tion make it all but impossible to assess the relations between theseassorted pieces of the pie we call reality, let alone assess the very condi-tions (both intellectual and material) that are prerequisite for just thesepie pieces and just this pie in the first place. This is surely one of the rea-sons why cross-disciplinary scholarship is met with suspicion in manysectors of the university—not least by scholars of sui generis religions.And this is precisely why the work of a scholar like Edward Said, whoseOrientalism transgressed so many traditional intellectual boundaries inthe late 1970s, can offer us one methodological model for our role astransgressive public intellectuals.8

6. ARE WE REPRODUCING OR CONTESTINGAUTHORITY?

It seems sensible that religious devotees make claims regarding theautonomy of their experiences. After all, "religion" is easily understood asa powerful and pervasive means by which human communities authorizetheir claims of historic and practical import by, in Roland Barthes's words,dressing up their own creations in "decorative displays" to make them passfor "what-goes-without-saying" (1973). Raschke's assertion that it is sensi-ble to talk of religious aberrations relies on just such unquestioned andundefensible decorative displays. Through their use of the tools ofnuanced description, their effort to recover authentic meaning, and theirdisdain for transgressive questions, scholars of religion risk uncriticallyreproducing such claims of autonomy and authority. Where they couldinstead be involved in the active business of uncloaking the ahistoricrhetoric that makes its appearance in public debates, scholars of religionqua translators have instead opted for the highly conservative practice ofentrenching ideologies and rhetorics—a point convincingly argued byGraeme MacQueen in his critical study of scholarship on myth.9 In the

1 For a useful assessment of the reception of Said's work over the past two decades, see Prakash.' MacQueen argues that by creating "myth," a seemingly uniform set of existentially meaningful

narratives largely concerned with ahistorical origins, scholars have ignored the relations betweensocio-political and gendered dominance and subordination in the societies they study. This "leavesstudents of myth in the dangerous position of lending unconscious support and legitimacy to struc-tures of authority in societies that they study" (144).


words of Karl Mannheim, the scholar as translator is little more than onewho "takes refuge in the past and attempts to find there an epoch or soci-ety in which an extinct form of reality-transcendence dominated theworld, and through this romantic reconstruction [they]... seek to spiritu-alize the present" (259). They are precisely the people involved in whatJeppe Sinding Jensen and Armin Geertz have aptly labelled the "politics ofnostalgia."

If, instead, religion is conceived as but one aspect of human practices, if"religion" itself is understood to be a second-order category of redescrip-tion (where the first order constitutes the behavior or claims beingdescribed by scholars) and not a third-order category of explanation andanalysis, then scholars of religion will have a significantly different role toplay in both the reproduction of authority and in public debates wheresuch authority is legitimized and contested. What I mean by this is thatfor scholars of religion, religion ought to be the subject of theorizing notappreciation or translation. "Religion," and claims about "religions,"might operate in the realm of description, but, when it comes to analysis(a higher order cognitive activity), both terms are replaced, reduced, totalk of minds, economies, societies, classes, genders, etc.10

Our involvement in the public debate is, then, on the higher level ofcritical, comparative analysis and critique. Whatever else religion may ormay not be, it is at least a potent manner by which humans constructmaps by which they negotiate not simply their way around the naturalworld but through which they defend and contest issues of social powerand privilege in the here and now. Religious language, therefore, is a terri-bly efficient and often uncontested means for abstracting issues, claims,and institutions from the tug-and-pull of historical existence, therebyprivileging them, their participants, and one particular view of how real-ity ought to be constructed. Scholars of religion come upon the scenewith sophisticated tools for comparing, analyzing, and critiquing thestrategies by which communities decontextualize and marginalize,mythify and deify one side in what is more than likely a complex situa-tion. We call into question the "aestheticization of the political" (Car-roll: 15) and the "authority of detachment" (Merod:xi) in the very act ofcontextualizing and historicizing our data. The scholar of religion as pub-lic intellectual is, by definition, involved in the act of resistance.

As opposed to being what Jerome Karabel labels as moralist (an intel-lectual making normative claims on how the world really ought towork), scholars of religion are therefore in the position of "identifyingthe conditions and processes that shape the actual political conscious-

0 For a survey of some recent uses of the category "religion," see McCutcheon 1995.


ness and actions of different groups"—including members of their owngroup (206)." Differing, then, from the moralist stands of such intellec-tuals as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said who see the role of the publicintellectual as being proactive, of speaking truth to power, exposing lies,and making normative claims (Chomsky 60; Said xvi, 85-102; as well, seeRaschke 136-137), the scholar of religion as critical rhetor insteadexposes the mechanisms whereby these very truths and norms are con-structed in the first place, demonstrating the contingency of seeminglynecessary conditions and the historical character of ahistorical claims.This, however, does not mean that we are, as a previous generation oncebelieved, methodologically agnostic or neutral observers: although wemust admit from the outset that we certainly do not know how or whatreality really is, in our efforts to study the truth claims of others in termsof their historical, rhetorical, and ideological foundations and implica-tions we are explicitly engaged in the ongoing project of critique.

However, we can at least in part follow Chomsky's lead by consistentlyexposing the intellectual and material conditions of thoughts and actionsin any given society. When compared to the moralist intellectual, how-ever, the scholar of religion as public intellectual—and as publiclyaccountable intellectual—is more timid about making pronouncementson what these conditions really should be. Clearly we come equippedwith our own assumptions—assumptions that are themselves deservingof scrutiny and analysis—but we have little interest in making normativeclaims concerning the need for all scholars to do as we do, or for all citi-zens to engage in the never-ending practice of critique. The particulargame we play, however, does presume that there are intellectual, social,and material motivations and implications to all human behaviors,beliefs, and institutions. To presume otherwise, to presume that mysteri-ous, divine, or other-worldly forces of unknown origin and design rou-tinely come into play when human beings interact, is to play asignificantly different game within an institutional context far removedfrom the public university. Given our presumption that all human actionsare historically constrained, such claims to mysterious forces will them-selves attract our critical attention.

Perhaps it is the realization of just this potential role for scholars ofreligion as public intellectuals that explains our absence from the cita-tions of those writers who advocate an increased role for religious faith inthe affairs of the state. For, after all, the scholar of religion as critical

" Karabel's article is written from this alternative—or what he terms the realist—position and isconcerned with identifying eight conditions that contribute to the political radicalization of intellec-tuals. Accordingly, Karabel is in a long line of sociologists of intellectuals dating back to Mannheim.


rhetor comes not to inform the world of how it ought to work, butexplains how and why it happens to work as it does, making such criticalscholarship a convenient resource to avoid when making pronounce-ments on the future of human meaning, the nation, or the world—claimsthat are either politically conservative or liberal, in support of dominantor oppositional regimes.

7. THE SCHOLAR OF RELIGION AS CRITIC

It is in his or her analysis of so-called religious institutions, traditions,myths, and rituals that the scholar of religion can contribute most touncloaking and laying bare the conditions and strategies by which his/herfellow citizens authorize the local as universal and the contingent as nec-essary. We can find in seemingly insignificant gestures and rhetoricalflourishes the makings of larger issues in the practice and reproduction ofpower and authority. In our analysis of the manner in which humansrepresent the world and their place in it—let alone our analysis of therepresentations of our colleagues in the university!—we are equipped toscrutinize the ideological sleight of hand that leads to a seemingly perfectfit between the model constructed and sanctioned by the society or groupin question, on the one hand, and reality, on the other—whatever thatreality may in fact turn out to be. It is this very sleight of hand, the "insti-tutional imperative," or the refraction of the seeming facts of the casethrough "the prism of Western ideology" that has attracted the attentionof Noam Chomsky's own analysis of mass media (Rai:28); for what typeof reality do we expect to find represented in elite media other than thereality tailored to suit the interests of elite producers/manufacturers whofinance the media as an avenue for selling products to upper-class con-sumers? It is through the comparison and analysis of competing repre-sentations that the public intellectual juxtaposes competing models ofthe world and attempts to explain why it is that such-and-such an insti-tution or story accompanies this or that model.12 Therefore, we are justi-fied to inquire into just what we are selling our readers and studentswhen through description and translation we uncritically reproduceauthoritative accounts in our scholarship.

Accordingly, for the scholar of religion as public intellectual, "religion"is a category that holds little analytical value. As both Pascal Boyer13 and

12 Chomsky's own work in comparing U.S. media coverage of Cambodian (official enemy) andIndonesian (official friendly) atrocities in the 1970s is startlingly frank evidence of the way in whichrepresentations vary with socio-economic and geo-political interests. In Manufacturing Religion Ihave used a similar comparative method to examine the differing scholarly and media representationsof the so-called "self-immolations" of Vietnamese Buddhist monks in the early 1960s (chapter 6).

13 "The study of religion is an 'impure' subject [in the chemical rather than the moFal sense], thatis, a subject where the central of official topic is not a scientific object" (212).


Jonathan Z. Smith,14 have suggested, it is a second order category, andpart of the problem to be studied, not a higher order category that is partof the explanation: it is part of the problem to be explained because as itis commonly defined (and Carter's text provides us with a perfect exam-ple) religious discourses remove something (a claim, an institution, apractice) from history, thereby privileging it over all other historically-embedded claims and knowledges. What else can it mean to encouragepublic debates to be settled by "discerning and then enacting the will ofGod" (Carter:77)?15 Such efforts are then presumed to be beyond natural-ist or material analysis and reproach. But we must inquire into just whatother part of our public debate would sanction a position that is basedupon such ahistorical certainty, such undefended and indefensible self-evidency? Even the phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident," hasreceived its share of critical attention, for it is abundantly clear that onlyland-owning free white males benefitted from the privileges accorded bythose so-called self-evidencies concerning the fact that "all men are cre-ated equal."

Therefore, the scholar of religion as critical rhetor has a crucial role toplay in matters of public concern, for who else will question just whatsense it makes to talk, as William Dean does, of such abstractions as "asense of the whole," "transcendence," "religious identity," "ultimate impor-tance," "ultimate meanings," and "implicit religious values"? Take, forinstance, Dean's reference to a former U.S. National Security Advisor: "InOut of Control [1993], Zbigniew Brzezinski attributed the forthcomingcollapse of America's world leadership, not to politics, economics, or therise of rivals, but to the growing spiritual illness of the whole Americanculture" (Dean:xiv). That such contemporary writers as Dean andBrzezinski can talk of such things as "American spiritual emptiness," "spir-itual illness," or "pervasive spiritual impoverishment" as if these were allcausal agents attests to the dire need for scholars of religion to enter thispublic debate. The point is that, despite the fact that "empty spirits" is awonderful metaphor, it is hardly a useful explanatory category; moreover,by marginalizing the explanatory power of political and economic analy-sis, by presuming that there is such a thing as a "whole" to culture in theUnited States, not to mention the problematic assumption that indeed theUnited States oughtto be an unrivalled leader in world politics, economics,

14"[T]he term 'religion' is not an empirical category. It is a second order abstraction" (1988:233).15 At this point in his argument Carter tries to reduce (obscure?) the debate on whether or not

women ought to be ordained to an essentially religious issue. The full quotation reads: "The answer[to the issue of whether women ought to be ordained] has everything to do with discerning and thenenacting the will of God, and nothing to do with the rights of women." What ought to attract ourcritical attention is not whether a deity desires women to be ordained but how easily writers likeCarter abstract this debate from issues of history, power, and gender—and then get away with it!


and the military, both Dean and Brzezinski betray their own uncriticalacceptance of a rather narrow party line. Simply put, we must questionwhat is implied in reducing empty stomachs to empty spirits and why it isconstrued as a crisis if others do not sanction such a spiritualization. Thescholar of religion as public intellectual is the one who is capable of identi-fying the ideological mechanisms working in such efforts to, inMannheim's words, "spiritualize the present."

Instead of being a translator, or, in his estimation, a caretaker for reli-gion ("caretaker" nicely communicates the role advocated by many AARPresidents), Burton Mack has recommended that we become culture crit-ics. "Culture" is, for Mack, the larger category into which religious prac-tices and beliefs fall when they are correctly understood as being nodifferent in origin or implication from other social authorizing practices."Since modern societies in the western tradition make such a fuss aboutkeeping religion separate from society," Mack writes, "we need the termculture to cover the phenomenon of values and attitudes cultivated withina society apart from overtly religious inculcation" (30).16 Whether or notthe study of religion is to be reduced to culture, scholars of religion as pub-lic intellectuals can at least agree that religion, religious discourses, andreligious practices are part of the descriptive, historical data that requirestheoretical study. We find no more succinct statement of the problems thatarise when we are anything other than scholars and critics than in the lastof Bruce Lincoln's thirteen "Theses on Method." He writes:

When one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in whichthey will be understood, suspends one's interest in the temporal and contin-gent, or fails to distinguish between "truths," "truth-claims," and "regimes oftruth," one has ceased to function as historian or scholar. In that moment, avariety of roles are available: some perfectly respectable (amanuensis, collec-tor, friend and advocate), and some less appealing (cheerleader, voyeur,retailer of import goods). None, however, should be confused with scholar-ship. (1996:227)

The only role possible for scholars who see religion as a powerful meanswhereby human communities construct and authorize their practices andinstitutions (i.e., their "regimes of truth") is that of the critic.

As already noted, and this bears repeating, for scholars qua critics reli-gion is not itself part of the explanation or solution (as it is for transla-

16 Needless to say, Mack immediately goes on to argue that such a change in datum would requireus to reconceive and reorganize departments of religion that are still largely the product of a seminarymodel. An example of how the study of religion might be effectively reorganized as the comparativestudy of culture is provided by Tim Fitzgerald. For an extremely helpful survey of some of the anthro-pological arguments concerning the questionable analytical usefulness of the category "culture" itself,see Brightman.


tors and caretakers) but is, instead, part of the problem to be explained(as it is for virtually all who develop theories of religion). That humanbeings who normally construct their lives based on often mundane expe-riences of the material, physical world sometimes invoke immaterial,non-empirical causes and explanations should itself attract our attentionas scholars. How is it that they distinguish between when it is, and whenit is not, appropriate to invoke such devices as gods, spirits, or fate as partof their understanding of the world at large? It has always struck me asintriguing that readers of "scriptures" somehow are able to decide, seem-ingly without any articulated or identifiable criteria, when to read a textas metaphoric or symbolic, and when to read it as literal.17 What varyingcriteria are being employed? If scholars of religion wish to make a contri-bution to the public debate, then perhaps this is one place to begin:developing theories of decision-making and the means by which humansrepresent/manipulate the world at large. For when it comes to publicdecisions on who should or should not receive welfare, when it is or isnot allowable to have an abortion, whether and where the budget shouldbe cut, or when to go to war, then implicit, intuitive, and non-falsifiablecriteria are hardly desirable. In fact, if democracy is desirable at all, it isprecisely because the decision-making process must answer in public tothe demands of a diverse citizenry.

Be clear: I am not advocating that the scholar of religion become apolitician, nor that she or he is the only critic capable of calling long-established certainties into question. To advance the former thesis wouldconfuse the public role of intellectuals with the possible contributionsthey may or may not make as private citizens participating in otheraspects of a representative democracy. To advance the latter would lead toyet a new turf war and further dangers of professionalization. Moreover, Iwould hope that readers recognize that I am hardly advocating the onetime popular notion of the intellectual as dispassionate, objectiveobserver. Further, I am not claiming that most of the population shouldabandon their own religious convictions—in fact, given the centrality ofusing rhetorical, ideological, and normative claims and strategies in con-structing and sanctioning the social and political models we life by andwithin, it would be naive to think that these sorts of claims would everdisappear. Instead, I am recommending that scholars of religion as publicintellectuals should not simply repeat or merely translate uncritically

17 The manner in which the vast majority of Christians somehow know that the Gospel of Markdoes not literally command them to handle snakes and drink poison is a case in point. That a smallgroup of Christians in the Appalachian region of the United States do indeed take such commandsliterally begs the question of how it is that devotees negotiate these complex decisions.


religious claims; instead, they are the ones who accept the challenge ofgenerating critical, scholarly theories about normative discourses; theyrecognize the critical potential of the tools at their disposal. Accordingly,normative reflection is not inherently problematic—one could go so faras to argue that it may actually be inevitable; it just happens to be a typeof discourse that we have tools to study. Our scholarship is not con-strained by whether or not devotees recognize its value; it is not intendedto celebrate or enhance normative, dehistoricized discourses but, rather,to contextualize and explain them as human constructs.

8. MODELS FOR CRITIQUING AUTHORIZING STRATEGIES

I can think of no better example of the critical potential for our fieldthan the most recent book by Bruce Lincoln, Authority: Construction andCorrosion (1994), especially his analysis of the 1992 attempt of the envi-ronmental activist, Rick Springer, to interrupt an National Association ofBroadcasters award ceremony in honor of former U.S. President RonaldReagan. Lincoln's creative and nuanced analysis of the strategies andmechanisms whereby seemingly self-evident authority was contested andreasserted demonstrates that the scholar of religion's tools apply to eventsand institutions not deemed religion by traditional, essentialist defini-tions. In fact, the development of Lincoln's work over the years seems tosuggest the clear movement away from studying distinct religion (a staticnoun) to studying the complex relations among authorizing practices(active processes or verbs) that appear in any number of social and his-torical settings. In other words, his scholarship exemplifies the transgres-sive role available to the scholar of social authorizing practices.

A second useful example of the kind of work in which we can engageas public intellectuals can be found in Marc Manganaro's own study ofauthority, a study that examines the particular rhetorical moves thatallow scholars of myth to slide so easily from description to socio-politi-cal prescription (a topic at the very core of Ivan Strenski's well-knowncritique of myth theorists). Using Northrop Frye's book, The CriticalPath: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism, Manganaroidentifies how Frye's specific reading of the anti-Vietnam War protestors,as well as the counterculture of the 1960s in general, contains and con-strains these events by representing them simply as repetitions and man-ifestations of primordial human desires. According to Manganaro, fromthe outset such an interpretation effectively minimalizes and marginal-izes the very social movement Frye is studying. Whether or not heintended it, by using the comparative method to place and understandthe particular event (a specific Vietnam War protest) in relation to a sup-


posedly general, universal theme (the human yearning for meaningunderstood in terms of archetypes), Frye dehistoricizes and marginalizesthe actual event by elevating it (or, should we say, demoting it) to thelevel of the abstract universal.

Borrowing from the work of the literary critic Fredric Jameson, Man-ganaro identifies a variety of these "strategies of containment" operatingin Frye's text, rhetorical strategies that enable Frye to depict the energy,novelty, and potential for concrete socio-political change found in the1960s counterculture as but eternal returns of the same. Unable to enter-tain that the protestors may have had a significant, novel, and concreterole to play in contemporary social change, Frye's mythification flattensthem and takes off their edge. In the hands of Frye's highly speculativecomparative method, "[e]xtremist movements . . . are characterized struc-turally according to their off-centeredness" and are therefore bracketedwithin a universal, uninterrupted great tradition (145). Such an essential-ist method that posits a transcendent manifested in certain discrete his-torical occasions inevitably reduces particularity to sameness.

As scholars of social authorizing practices, we fail to fulfill our role aspublic intellectuals when we decline to demonstrate consistently thatsuch a thing as society, text, nation, ethnicity, tradition, intuition, gender,myth, or even religion, is "not a natural or god-given entity, but is a con-structed, manufactured, even in some cases invented object, with a his-tory of struggle and conquest behind it" (Said:33).18 We are trained toexamine the specific sites where human communities construct theirenduring representations, representations that function to make it self-evident "that the values one holds are grounded in the inherent structureof reality, that between the way one ought to live and the way things reallyare there is an unbreakable inner connection" (Geertz:97). Althoughsome would argue that Geertz's definition of religion is far too wide to beof any analytical use (Asad:27-54), its benefit lies precisely in the assump-tion that religion is but one species of the human penchant for universal-izing and spiritualizing the local and the particular. As noted by theliterary critic Frank Lentricchia at the outset of this essay, "it is the func-tion of the intellectual as critical rhetor to uncover, bring to light, andprobe" all such mechanisms. To uncover—and thereby challenge—theoften occluded and disguised mechanisms that carry out these universal-izations is nothing other than the consistent analysis of ideologies: themeans by which slippage from is to ought routinely takes place.

18 I have commented on the way in which such a self-conception of scholars of religion can affectthe classroom in my review of some current resources in the cross-disciplinary study of myths andrituals (in press).


In fact, it is this virtue of consistency, or what Said terms "universalapplication," along with the notion of the intellectual as an amateur unin-volved in the careerism and institutional, disciplinary turf wars broughton by professionalism, that lies at the heart of Said's 1993 Reith Lectures,Representations of the Intellectual. The public intellectual's skills are heror his commitment to uncertainty,19 public debate, along with an unfailingdesire to apply critical tools equally in all situations (not just to "them" and"their practices and creations" but to "us" and "ours" as well20). All of theseare simply the virtues of good scholarship—or what Chomsky terms intel-lectual self-defense—scholarship that, once published, read, and quoted,becomes a public, political act. Whether we like it or not, then, we are pub-lic intellectuals already. The question is whether we will accept this role or,through our efforts to spiritualize and dehistoricize the people and prac-tices we study via such suspect conceptual devices as sui generis religion, wewill obscure both our data and our social role, thereby contributing to thevery authorizing practices we could instead be questioning. To me thechoice is rather straightforward: whether to reproduce or challenge theideological mechanisms and alignments whereby description becomesprescription and the local is represented as universal.

9. CONCLUSION: A PERIOD OF SOME SIGNIFICANCE FORTHE STUDY OF RELIGION

There exists a default of critical intelligence among scholars of religion,scholars who proclaim their apoliticism and in the very same breathdescriptively reproduce the authorized "sacred histories." Through ourinsistent preoccupation with issues of intellectual, methodological, pro-fessional, and institutional turf—in a word, our autonomy—we tie our

" In his critical review of Marsden and others, Alan Wolfe has stated it bluntly: we are certain "onlythat the university is not the place for certainties" (77). As persuasive as I find parts of Wolfe's critiqueof Marsden, especially Marsden's claim that the heterogeneity afforded by the postmodern perspec-tive provides one way for faith to reenter the university curriculum (to which Wolfe flatly answers: "Asa believer, after all, Marsden cannot really be a postmodernist"), his rather unsophisticated under-standing of the relations between knowledge and power, and where the university figures in all this,severely hamper his critique.

20 For, as noted by Lentricchia, what the intellectual tends "to ignore, hide, or be unaware of, is hisown active work of tradition-making, which causes ideas to survive through time, to become part ofthe transhistorical myth he calls 'Western Culture and Tradition.'" (126). Simply put, intellectuals areoften what Antonio Gramsci termed "experts in legitimation"—a category applicable to scholars ofsui generis religion. We are, therefore, hardly dispassionate observers of the workings of power. On thecontrary: often, we are the most important "ideological managers" in any society (to borrow a termfrom Chomsky). Indeed, there are numerous incentives for our complicity with power: institutionalaffiliation, promotion, tenure, salaries, fellowships, and much coveted (though often meager) profes-sional and cultural prestige. Much like contestants in beauty pageants competing for fur coats andcars, we too have prizes that award our complicity with dominant regimes.


own hands and gag our own mouths, forcing ourselves to act as if theworld passes us by alone, unaffected, and safe. As I have argued elsewhere:"To fail to make explicit the social and political motivations/benefitsbehind what the apparent majority of'religionists' yet think to be the suigeneris quality of religion, its texts, and its language... is to fall consider-ably short of what the academic study of religion could be" (1991:256).

To accept the role of public intellectual requires us consistently to laybare these mechanisms of power and control. Our role is not to act ascaretakers for religion, trying, along with Raschke, to save "the vitality, aswell as the moral and cultural influence, of religion in the world" (135),but rather our role is unfailingly to probe beneath the rhetorical windowdressings that authorize conceptual and social constructions of our ownmaking. To join with the many scholars in our field intent on protectingand caring for religion is implicitly to acknowledge that we have no criti-cal contribution to make to the study of human behavior and institutionsand are, instead, simply reporters and legitimizers of essential self-evidencies. As already suggested, however, reporting self-evidencies ishardly deserving of public support. But given the alternative, even oppo-sitional, role of uncovering, and teaching others to uncover, rhetoricaland ideological window dressings—wherever and whenever we may findthem—we must be prepared for an adverse reaction from both our col-leagues and the wider public: one does not win a popularity contest bypointing out the emperor's general state of undress. Given our role ascritics, we may very well have to come to terms with the fact that ques-tioning self-evidencies might also hardly be deserving of public support.After all, few institutions have built-in self-destruct mechanisms. Butgiven the general intellectual freedom that comes with operating within across-disciplinary setting in the public university, some of us will be ableto make tactical and local contributions to the analysis of authorizingpractices in a surprising number of sites.

It is with deep irony, then, that I now find myself seemingly in agree-ment with Mircea Eliade when he suggested in his essay, "A New Human-ism," that the scholar of religion "is destined to play an important role incontemporary cultural life" (3). Eliade, however, saw this role as therecovery of archaic meanings housed in supposedly timeless myths andrituals. This is nothing other than the politics of nostalgia of which Sind-ing Jensen and Geertz spoke. Instead, I side with Mack in recommendingfor scholars of religion the role of critic, rather than Eliade's role of savior,for our work is carried out within the material contestations of historyrather than in the mists of meaning and primordial time. Moreover, farfrom being "destined" for such a role, we are continually tempted to for-sake critical thinking and instead to enjoy the spoils and privileges that


are routinely awarded to those who accept the less controversial role ofreporter, translator, and caretaker—all of which amount simply to beingideological managers. Instead, the scholar of religion as public intellectualand critic of authorizing practices comes equipped with methodologiesand theories to identify those homogenizing, ideological strategies sonecessary for the manufacture and management of human communi-ties—scholarly communities included. For these very strategies areresponsible for portraying that which is different as the same, the many asone, the fragmented as whole, the other as aberrant, and, perhaps mostimportantly, the religious as autonomous.

With such critical tools at our disposal, how can we not have some-thing important to say on the public stage about such issues as the placeof religious intuition, insight, and commitment in the academy and thepublic policy domain? Who, if not the scholar of social authorizing prac-tices, will come forward to identify the slippery logic, rhetorical flour-ishes, and ideological strategies that, together, drive intellectual, social,and political practice in all its varied guises? Such cultural criticism isslowly taking hold at a number of sites throughout the late twentieth-century discourse on religion, precisely when the previous rationale forour field is coming under well-deserved criticism; it seems, then, thatJohn F. Wilson's words ring as true now as they did over thirty years ago:"we seem about to enter a period of some significance for the study ofreligion" (252).

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mccutcheon, scholar as public intellectual

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