The Category Formerly Known as Religion

In 1993, one of the world's greatest musicians abandoned the stage name that, for decades, had emblazoned the cover of albums and concert posters. In the place of a name, the musician began to use something else entirely: a visual emblem, a glyph, which combined the astrological symbols for Mars and Venus commonly used to signify male and female. Although evocative, the new ideograph gave no clues as to how it should be pronounced, making it difficult for journalists and fans to speak about the musician. After a period of uncertainty, commentators eventually settled on a convention for referring to the musician without using the now-abandoned name: they spoke of “the artist formerly known as Prince.” As a scholar of religion, and as a long-time fan of the musician described above, I find myself in special sympathy both with the artist and with those who struggle to speak about the artist. In fact, the journey from Prince to “the artist formerly known as Prince” seems to resonate with our own history of designations in the field of religious studies. Like the artist, we, religious studies scholars, have also become tired of our designation and have tried to move beyond it.1 Also like the artist, we have aimed to remake our identity in ways that transcend the biases and binaries built into our discipline's name: biases in favour of belief, textuality and Christianity; and binaries that construe religion in opposition to the secular, the state, or the political. It may or may not be a coincidence that our own attempts to move beyond the category of religion also have roots in 1993. In the very same year that Prince became “the artist,” Talal Asad published his Genealogies of Religion—which, I would argue, is as good an epochal inflection point as any when it comes to our current crisis of identity.2 Sadly, the field of religious studies has not come up with its own glyph. Instead, we continue to muddle through using our original designation, but in a canny way. We try to write about religion without writing about religion. We use the category in ways that signal to our colleagues and students that we are aware of its many limitations, its history, its politics and characteristic deformations. Were we not so averse to punctuation, our prose would contain mountains of “scare quotes.” In the absence of quotes, we rely on trust: we trust that our readers know that, when the term religion appears in our prose, we have in mind not the historically freighted, conceptually compromised sense of the term but the term in its more humbled, “problematized,” post-Asadian sense—as a placeholder awaiting some future category formerly known as religion. There are softer and harder versions of our categorical disaffection. In the softer version, religion is imperfect but still serviceable. It is imperfect because of the interpretive inertia it carries, the ways it encourages us to think about and look at the world. Uncritically used, without actual or intended scare quotes, religion implies that our objects of study are simply out there in the world awaiting our investigation—that they are free-standing exempla, species of a common genius whose largest and most successful descendants go by the names Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and any other tradition that manages to crack into the category of world religions. In this version of the critique, religion's mischief flows not just from its false universalism but from its association with subcategories and oppositions (ritual versus myth, sacred versus secular) that claim to be neutral while silently reproducing the taxonomies and valuations of protestant Christianity. What makes religion serviceable in this version of the critique is that, like confession, once the vices are declared, absolution is possible. Religion can be used in the same way that a car can be driven with one headlight or a computer can be operated without an “m’” key: once aware of the defects, users can circumvent them. Religion can be used as the opening offer in a game of analytical bargaining. I start by speaking of religion, only to refine and limit its connotations. I confess its histories here and its politics there. I point to its use in colonization or tax evasion, all the while remaining free from the distortions and partisanship that I call into view. I orient my research around the category of religion in the same way that a planet orients to an orbit or electron to a nucleus: relying on the semantic pull of the term to lay a track of investigation around the category but I avoid being sucked into its conceptual center of mass. There is also a harder version of our scholarly disaffection with the category of religion. It is one that sees the goal of our study as moving beyond the category of religion altogether. The hard critique insists that when it comes to the category, what we have is not a salvageable automobile or missing computer keys but an inappropriate tool altogether. Rather than drive or type our way to an explanation of the world, we need to let the world set the terms and tools of inquiry. We should use the categories of those whom we study rather than look for religion in them. Failing to do so, the thinking goes, we predetermine what we see. In the same way that driving presumes roads and computers presume microchips, so too does the category of religion presume its own constituents and correlates (priests, scriptures, rituals), which may not be appropriate to, or reflective of, the worlds about which we write. Speaking of pilgrimage or merit-making as religion, therefore, is like trying to drive on train tracks or strip paint off the wall with a PC. It is the wrong tool for the job and will probably do some damage. We will never know whether the artist's name change reflected a softer or harder disaffection with his previous designation. We'll never know whether the artist thought names, as a convention, were salvageable or not. Speaking as a fan and as someone who searches Spotify by artist, I find it difficult to avoid the designation Prince—despite my desire to follow the artist's lead and exit the gravitational pull of the name. I have similar feelings when it comes to the category of religion. I remain stuck in its orbit, in some ways, willingly. I have both principled and pragmatic reasons for holding on to religion. The principled reason is that, whether or not religion is a perfect tool for analyzing the world, it remains a category that is nevertheless used by many of the people whose actions we say it does not describe. This is certainly true over the last two centuries, during which time the category of religion spread around the world through networks of colonization, missionization, trade, and law. If we extend the argument to religion-like categories in local discourses—for example, dīn, dharma—the insight might also be applied to earlier centuries, in Asia, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere (Abbasi 2020; Kleine 2024; Galbraith 2023; Stowers 2024; Sweetman 2003). To say that people used religion is not to say that they used the category naively. Indeed, judging from the sources available to us, it seems clear that persons in colonial Ceylon or independent Indonesia who spoke about religion (rendered in both Sinhala and Bahasa Indonesia as āgama) did so in ways similar to religious studies scholars: they treated the category as a tool, an instrument for achieving certain ends (Malalgoda 1997; Michel Picard 2003). They are not the only ones, of course. Throughout the world and across time, humans have opted in to religion and religion-like categories for various reasons: to make alliances and gain protection, to seek favor, and to justify violence. Religion may not be a perfect tool of analysis nor a universal category of social life, but it is not always a scholarly (or Western) imposition. The above examples shine a different light on religious studies scholars' categorical compunctions. If our hesitations about religion stem from its tendency to misrepresent the realities of others, then we must also admit that when we deny the category of religion (or Buddhism or Hinduism) to those who claim it, we are also misrepresenting humans because we are denying to them their own acts of self-designation and meaning-making. To refuse religion to Sinhala speakers in Kandy or Balinese intellectuals in Indonesia—ostensibly on the grounds that they use the category mistakenly or under duress or without an awareness of its flaws—is to commit the harm we seek to avoid in the first place: the harm of overwriting complexity with our own narrow interests and regimes of classification. One can acknowledge the instability of terms like religion or Buddhism or Hinduism in their everyday usages without denying the salience of these terms for intervening in and ordering worlds.3 None of this should be taken as an excuse for ignoring other salient categories and classifications in our research. Nor should any of this be construed as defending the idea that the English term religion aligns perfectly, semantically speaking, with its various translations and approximations in the world's vernaculars. As multiple scholars have shown, where it is salient, religion exists alongside local categories and antonyms that shape and color its meanings: the connotations of religion-like categories such as āgama (in Sri Lanka or Bali) or shūkyō (in Japan) only become apparent when contrasted with other categories such as sāsana, adat or superstition (Josephson 2012; Malalgoda 1997; Michel Picard 2000; Jolyon B. Thomas 2019; von Benda-Beckmann 2009). Religion may not be out there ontologically, but it is likely already in there discursively—vernacularized, localized, operationalized by persons on the ground. Whether or not one accepts the universality of religion as a perennial feature of human cultures, one can nevertheless concede that religion and religion-adjacent concepts have influenced human culture in many places and times. People have been driving with one light and typing without an “m” key for quite some time. So much for my principled reasons for holding on to religion. My pragmatic reason is less high-minded. At the large public university in Aotearoa, New Zealand, where I teach, students select classes in Religious Studies because of some enchantment with the word or idea of religion—or so I suspect. Students here choose a class on “Buddhist Thought” or “Religion and Identity” because they have a fascination with religion in its pre-critical, pre-Asadian sense. Our small Religion Program counts on this, even if only to perpetrate our own categorical bait-and-switch once they enter our classrooms: lure them with Prince, teach them about the artist. Yet even this gambit is becoming tenuous. In New Zealand, as in many other countries, growing numbers of people no longer identify with a religious community, at least as measured in national surveys. Our country's most recent census, conducted in 2018, found that nearly half of all Kiwis (48.2%) report having no religion. A growing decline in students' familiarity with institutional religion places even greater pressure on our program to step up its defense of the field, and the category, as something important and influential in the world, whether our students identify with it or not. Unlike in the US, where university students have often heard of religious studies, in New Zealand, almost all school-leavers arrive at university having had no exposure to the academic study of religion. As a result, the category of religion serves not one but two purposes for our program: it provides a name for what we do and draws an important contrast with another field of study that students have heard of:theology. Historians of religion often narrate the evolution of religious studies as a discipline, in two steps. In the first step, the humanistic study of religion is separated from the confessional study of theology. In the second step, the emergent field of religious studies undergoes its critical turn; it reassesses the apical category. The problem is that religious studies programs in places like New Zealand have not even made it to step one. Most people still confuse us with theology. As a field of research, religious studies may have moved beyond religion, but as a global community of teaching programs, many of us remain stuck in earlier phases in our field's supposed evolution. We have not yet had our 'Purple Rain moment'—our moment of widespread recognition as a discipline—from which we can move beyond. And I worry we may not get there. Humanities programs at public universities in Australia and New Zealand, as in other parts of the world, are increasingly being asked to justify their existence. Budgets, research support, and survival itself depend on our being able to make a case for what we study. Faced with these dilemmas, many of us find ourselves—at our lowest moments—engaging in what feels like duplicity: giving a sales pitch to parents, students, and funders that we hesitate to stand by in our work. This is more than just marketing talk. At its worst, it involves a kind of bad faith, a necessary deception required for us to “do our work.” We feel sheepish (especially in New Zealand) about the frailty of the category that defines our professional life. Viewed in this way, my reluctance to move beyond religion stems as much from the scholarly principles stated above as from a more basic practical reason: the existence of religion is not simply a noble lie with which we might dispense; it is also the category on which many of us depend for our institutional survival, like or it or not. If all of this seems rather bleak, I do not intend to be that way. Our collective vexing over religion—or the category formerly known as religion—need not imply the decline of religious studies as a field of theory and teaching. Indeed, as Thomas (2024) points out in his editorial, it may be a sign of its vigor and vitality. When it comes to studying religion, there are two stories that seem to be emerging at the same time, pushing religion (and its academic interrogators) in opposite directions. On the one hand, religion programs are shrinking and closing, threatening the discipline and its professionals. On the other hand, the number of scholars interested in writing about religion on our campuses appears to be growing. At the very moment that religion programs face existential threats, the topic of religion is gaining special salience in other scholarly fields. Since the epoch-making year of 1993, the fields of Political Science, Law, Psychology, and Cognitive Science—among several others—have increasingly “found religion,” seizing on it as an important topic of research and teaching (Barrett 2007; Philpott 2009; Oraby and Sullivan 2020; Purzycki and Sosis 2022). Entire subfields are now dedicated to the study of law and religion, religious law, politics and religion, political theology, the cognitive science of religion, and so on. At the same time that religious studies scholars have been questioning our master category, scholars from around the university show a new interest in the category themselves. While some may see this as a threat to religious studies, I believe that this diffusion of interest is positive. Among other things, the spread of religion across the disciplines creates new opportunities for religious studies scholars to apply our critical insights to other fields. To my mind, many of the most exciting theoretical advances in recent years can be traced to scholars—from religious studies and other fields—who have been doing just that: applying the post-Asadian critiques of religion to the fields of law, politics and international relations (Hurd 2008; Bender and Klassen 2010; Agrama 2012; Sullivan et al. 2015; Hussin 2016; Mahmood 2016; Reinbold 2016; Moustafa 2018; Sullivan 2018). Benefits also await us when we embrace diffusion in the other direction by inviting new kinds of academics into our own field. At the University of Otago, our program has benefited significantly from hiring scholars whose approach to the study of religion relies on methods that (I suspect) some readers of the journal will think of as being outside of the traditional limits of religious studies programs: experimental and empirical methods drawn from psychological, evolutionary and cognitive sciences. I understand the hesitations; I had them at first as well. Yet, let's face it: the organization of many religious studies programs needs updating. For decades, departments have been hiring and teaching according to the very “world religions” categories that we reject in our scholarship. If we want to expand the case for religious studies and to critically examine the limits and nature of the category more fully and broadly, we also have to practice what we preach: we must embrace the methodological diversity that we say characterizes our field. At Otago, we have seen clear benefits to combining empirical and experimental approaches to religion with the textual, historical, and ethnographic ones that are more familiar to the field. In addition to enriching our teaching, it has led to new networks and scholarly projects that link together religious studies with fields of public health, anatomy, demography, and archaeology. Moreover, it has stimulated energetic conversations among students and staff about the nature, locations, functions, and formations of religion across time and space, as well as the limits and benefits of approaching them through small case studies or larger empirical ones. So where does this leave us? As might be fitting, I end with the oracular words of the artist, who, in the song “Let's Go Crazy,” challenges listeners: “If you don't like the world you're living in, take a look around you. At least you got friends.” As scholars of religion, we may feel institutionally but we have of Our I on us up the artist's to go a and our the time is for “the category formerly known as but in a different sense of the we on to the category while its and making new