Religion rejiggered

Thinking about how to swing next semester's lecture course "After Religion" in ways which don't reinforce bad old ideas of religion and religions I'm pleased to find a congenial spirit in the Scots scholar Malory Nye. As he considers the need to find ways of "Decolonizing the Study of Religion," he suggests a way of rescuing courses like "Religions of Asia" from their colonial legacies. Too often, he shows, such courses present these traditions as ancient and venerable, in a way which gives short shrift to their contemporary forms. (It also conveniently leaves the modern space open for forms of inquiry and practice coded as universal, secular, western.)

My suggestion is that the subject matter of such courses would be best taught through an approach that does not remove (what we assume to be) modernity, but instead uses it as the entry into our engagement with the material. That is, to teach from the present backwards—through looking at the postcolonial present and how that has been created by the forces of the past. The organizations and traditions of the postcolonial world that are now classified as religions have been formed into their contemporary practices and structures by the legacies of colonialism, even when they draw on rich and diverse pre-colonial histories and sources. (13)

I have been planning a structure something like this, beginning with contemporary events before swooping back to the artifact of world religions en route to ending with Anthropocene challenges. In the middle section, I was imagining I'd find some way of giving students what I was assuming they'd come for ("I've always wanted to take a course on religion" or "learn about world religions") without selling my soul, but just how to pull this off I didn't know. Nye suggests a way to me. We'll use something like the great anthology Figures of Buddhist Modernity in Asia to undermine the idea that any modern form of a tradition is somehow inauthentic, also making clear that even if everything happens in a landscape shaped by western colonialism, the construction of Buddhism as a religion (say) is something that's done not only by western colonial institutions - including the western "Academy." 

Perhaps I could try to talk about traditions like Vietnamese Caodai - whence the image above (it's from a temple in California!). In some ways this is the natural extension of things I've taught regarding "lived religion" and "religion-making" but in a broader way. It's not just that "religion" lives in the syncretic adaptations of members, and that it's not just scholars who have commitments regarding "religion" and its value. It's facing that western colonialism and the capitalist forces it unleashed have remade the religious world. Fantasies of religious worlds untouched by this process (hello, "world religions") are themselves products of this process, and perhaps more beholden to it than are religious innovators, especially those on the colonial peripheries, who have no choice but to face fully the complicated realities of our time.