Outline of a Critical Phenomenology of Religion

ABSTRACT In recent years, the US has witnessed an explosion of populist Christian nationalism fueling the rise of the Trump presidencies, relying heavily on the mass dissemination of charismatic forms of religious experience. Until very recently, scarcely a mention of these independent charismatic evangelical networks, such as the New Apostolic Reformation, had surfaced in religious studies scholarship. What factors within our disciplinary framework might have contributed to this remarkable neglect? This article suggests that scholarship has failed to observe substantial shifts in global religiosity in large part because the mainstream of religious studies has consciously excised phenomenological approaches from our disciplinary toolbox. I make the case for resituating the term phenomenology within the twenty-first century trajectory of our discipline by outlining the contours of what we might call a critical phenomenology of religion, which aims to treat experiential phenomena as agentively shaping the external world in their concrete sociopolitical contexts.