For years, when planning and revising the syllabus for "Theorizing Religion," the required course for our religious studies minors, I've felt there was something missing. A major argument of the class is that the modern western category of "religion" distorts the experience of non-western (and non-modern) peoples, and may even have been designed to do that. The world religions paradigm, despite its kumbaya veneer, does that too, registering and (to a degree) venerating as "religion" only those aspects of premodern and non-western traditions which resonate with what Tomoko Masuzawa calls "European universalism." If the modern western "religion" concept was so lousy, oughtn't I to be introducing alternatives from non-western and premodern traditions? The problem (beyond the very real limits of my reading) was baked in: if "religion" is a modern western thing, illegitimately projected onto cultures and traditions foreign to it, then there are no non-western or premodern analogs to turn to. Indeed supposing there are is just repeating the same mistake; assuming there must be counterparts to it reasserts the universality of the category of "religion" we claim we're trying to think beyond!
In "After Religion," I had just one class - our topic for the week is What is "religion" anyway? - to take a stab at these questions, but I made headway somehow! The time limits probably helped, as did the fact that this course isn't an introduction to the academic study of religion. But best of all were the readings I wound up assigning, two chapters from Brent Nongbri's Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, and an essay on "Indigenous African Traditions as Models for Theorizing Religion" by Edward P. Antonio. (Students were also assigned a fab documentary about The Satanic Temple, but that's topic for another post.) Nongbri's a historian of the religions of the ancient (western) world, and his little book deftly demonstrates the many unfamiliar ways the word religio was used before modernity - there was no analog to the modern concept - and chronicles the emergence in the Renaissance and early modern period of the "modern notion of religion as an essentially private or spiritual realm that somehow transcends the mundane world of language and history (18), touching on Ficino, Bruno, Herbert of Cherbury, Bodin and Locke. But for most of my students, the European 16th and 17th centuries are ancient history.
More exciting and accessible was the careful argument of Antonio. Before discussing it (in my prerecorded lecture, trying to be animated but not overact), I held up Nongbri's book and the book where Antonio's essay appears, Religion, Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches and Metholologies, a literal door-stopper. More to the point, Religion, Theory, Critique's almost seven hundred pages include fifty-fifty six fine-print chapters on theory of religion of which only four are about "Religion beyond the West," one of which is Antonio's. (The others are, predictably, on the Arabic din, on the Chinese zongjiao, and on translation.) The myopia of my "Theorizing Religion" is, alas, par for the course. But Antonio's piece as a revelation.
Antonio is rightly leery of the question what African traditions can contribute to the western theory of religion. African traditions are immensely varied and the western theory of religion has routinely ignored all of them. And besides: there is no analog to the modern notion of religion. Any contribution would have to begin by insisting on the "otherness" of indigenous African ways to western theory. Most of what is theorized under “religion” can be theorized in nonreligious terms in African traditions (150).
The point cannot be to ground a new universal theory of religion in indigenous African traditions. The idea that there is such a thing as religion and that it is universal, the idea that underwrites the efforts of many scholars of religion to see religion everywhere, is largely a Western obsession. (149) Instead of a "theory" or "model" he suggests African indigenous traditions might illuminate as a "heuristic," a rough guide that aids the discovery of intelligibility and understanding in knowledge and interpretation (148). Writing in English (except for one reference to ubuntu), Antonio deflects from "religion" with the language of the everyday, common-sense, immanence, phenomenology, hermeneutics, pragmatism, anthropology and, most important, a "humanism" focused on persons, communities, hospitality and health and maintained by the indispensable work of divination whose ethically superior practitioners provide[e] a space for determining the preconditions of proper relationally and thus of what it means to be human (152).
When not explicitly or tacitly denying Africa has religion, or relegating its traditions to some "primal" category, western scholars note the embeddedness of "religion" in everyday social life and argue the significance of the "practice of everyday life" is entirely attributable to religion. Everything is sacred! Antonio suggests that this gets things back to front. Religious practices do not refer to phenomena outside the world (150). The immanent world of everyday social interactions is where everything happens, including not only the relationships that constitute us, but the equally significant practices of hospitality with "others," from ancestors to spirits. If the theory of religion were open to this "heuristic," Antonio brings it together, African religious traditions will have taught the study of religion the importance of privileging not gods, spirits, the cosmos, notions of salvation understood as the quest for the other world, and ritual as bizarre performance of inarticulable abjection, but humanity as the space of relational encounter with otherness in the fullness of all its variety—human, natural, and spiritual (153).
I love this, and have to stop myself from wanting to - yes - universalize it. Isn't this really what's going on even in those "religions" where people are convinced they are guided by "phenomena outside the world," think they can and should stand alone before the transcendent without any human aid or witness? It resonates with my long-standing efforts to characterize religion (sic) in terms of "wider moral communities." And yet, of course, Antonio is also saying that this is not a better, broader account of "religion," though it may describe interactions and relationships which theories of "religion" might appreciate. To learn from it I'll need to try to see whether "anthropological humanism" can satisfy my local as well as broader concerns, and if not, why not. And of course not to stop with the generalizations (and English terms) of his necessarily abbreviated article. Not in this class, but in the next "Theorizing Religion"!
