As you know, this week's theme in "After Religion" is "The invention of 'world religions.'" Last week we made our way through arguments that the idea of religion as a separate province of culture, distinctively personal and transcending history and politics, is a modern western contrivance. This week's task is to dismantle the mythology of world religions... that there are any such things! Great and complicated networks of transmission and practice exist, of course, but designating them "world religions" misdescribes them. Insisting that religion is, as Brent Nongbri puts it, "a genus that contains a variety of species, that is, the individual religions of the world, or World Religions" makes them seem both too similar and, perhaps, too different.
Our most diverting material was the special series of "picture essays" LIFE magazine ran on "The World's Great Religions" in 1955, touted as "a unique venture in journalism": Hinduism, The Path of Buddhism, Religion in the Land of Confucius, The World of Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The issues are conveniently digitized, allowing us not only to access them easily, but to encounter them as readers then will have, between other articles and, of course, sandwiched between glossy advertisements for cars, Jell-O, life insurance, girdles and tobacco. It was important to for me that the class discover them this way, because when you think about it, world religions are one of the most effectively packaged product lines of our time. Marx would smile: the series begins opposite a cigarette advertisement.
The rationale for the series is interesting. The time when people of the East thought Western thought crude, and Westerners thought the Eastern quaint, the proper concern of missionaries, is ending. Today nations which follow ancient religions are resurgent and ambitious and, in today's world, no nations are remote. It's valuable to understand the drivers of conduct in an increasingly uppity decolonizing world, and it can also be personally enriching. Returning more and more to the devout practices of their own faiths, Americans can re-examine and enrich their own spiritual life through the insights and intuitions of others. The voice comes through of a Christian missionary disappointed in India but energized in the struggle for man's soul against godless communism. That the world religions might all come to roost in the US is beyond imagining.
Each of the photo essays is gorgeous and interesting in its own way, resonating and contrasting with later images of the distinctive character of the world religions, but it's worth noting that the Christianity celebrated at the end is primus inter pares. The first five appeared monthly at the start of 1955, but Christianity appeared half a year later at Christmas in a glossy double issue - longer than all the rest combined. And when you look more carefully you see that the "World's Great Religions" series only ever comprised the first five. While there are symbols for all six on the programmatic opening page, the editors note that Christianity, the great religion of the West, will be the subject of separate and later treatment.
Lots of features of the world religions discourse can be discerned here, from the slippery status of Confucianism as a religion to the supposedly unchanged antiquity of Hinduism and Judaism to Islam's "missions" and "Buddhism's "conversion of Asia." While all confront modernity (and communism), Christianity alone seems to be in charge of its destiny - and so of the destiny of all. The book-length Christianity issue is full of scenes of revivals, processions, and men of the cloth ready for battle. Included is even a section of hymns, which prominently features the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
The name of the week, "The invention of 'world religions,'" pays tribute to a book of that name by Tomoko Masuzawa, which argued that the apparently egalitarian array of world religions is really still European Universalism ... Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. This was a shocker in religious studies in 2005, which had worked within this schema as unthinkingly as the social sciences within secularization theory, but old news for my students in 2021. Not that the "world religions" carry any great promise for folks "after religion," but the notion that this might be a construct that serves to enthrone Christianity as king of kings surprises them not at all. Organized religion is all about supremacy - why they're after religion.
On the other hand, when I asked them in a google.doc whether they'd learned about religion in school, and/or if they think children should learn about "religion, spirituality and what comes 'after religion,'" they were all in. Variously myopic or truncated experiences gave them a strong of sense of how not to do it, but inculcating respect and tolerance of religious difference seemed a worthy and important goal. A few showed up for my "open office hours" where someone asked me what I thought, and was treated to a mini-lecture on Nell Nodding's Education for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, which argues that school children deserve to be introduced to larger existential questions, but best if this is not in a separate course. They can arise organically in history and literature but also math and science and art classes.
None seemed as enthralled as I am by the Museum of World Religions in Taipei. One said its "sterile museum-type mode" reminded him of classes he'd had to take, from which he retained nothing. He may have read the organizers' hope that Entering the museum will be like entering a religious department store! But then I haven't confronted the class with how it might differ from western museums since it's part of "Avatamsaka World." Introducing them to that sutra's simile of Indra's Net (jewels each of which reflect all the others) might provoke some transformative wonder. World religions may be stale brands, but the different theologies of world religions might get things cooking!
