Questioning the Category of Religion

In recent years scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the category of religion to describe a distinctive form of human experience and behavior. In his last book, The Ideology of Religious Studies (OUP 2000), Timothy Fitzgerald argued that religion was not a private area of human existence that could be separated from the public realm and that the study of religion as such was thus impossibility.

Transformation of the Concept

In this new book he examines a wide range of English-language texts to show how religion became transformed from a very specific category indigenous to Christian culture into a universalist claim about human nature and society. These claims, he shows, are implied by and frequently explicit in theories and methods of comparative religion. But they are also tacitly reproduced throughout the humanities in the relatively indiscriminate use of religion as an a priori valid cross-cultural analytical concept, for example in historiography, sociology, and social anthropology.

Linking Religion to Other Dichotomies

Fitzgerald seeks to link the argument about religion to the parallel formation of the non-religious and such dichotomies as church-state, sacred-profane, ecclesiastical-civil, spiritual-temporal, supernatural-natural, and irrational-rational. Part of his argument is that the category religion has a different logic compared to the category sacred, but the two have been consistently confused by major writers, including Durkheim and Eliade.

The Concept of Religion and Its Implications

Fitzgerald contends that religion imagined as a private belief in the supernatural was a necessary conceptual space for the simultaneous imagining of secular practices and institutions such as politics, economics, and the Nation State. The invention of religion as a universal type of experience, practice, and institution was partly the result of sacralizing new concepts of exchange, ownership, and labor practices, applying scientific rationality to human behavior, administering the colonies and classifying native institutions. In contrast, shows Fitzgerald, the sacred-profane dichotomy has a different logic of use.