Discourse on civility and barbarity : a critical history of religion and related categories

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. 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. 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. 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. ## Abstract This book analyzes the development of different meanings of the term “religion” in different contexts and in relation to other categories with shifting and unstable nuances such as the state, politics, economics, and the secular. It traces a major transformation of the category as a function of Euro‐American colonialism and capitalism from its traditional meaning of Christian Truth to the modern generic and pluralized category of religions and world religions. For centuries the English word Religion meant Christian Truth, and it stood in opposition to superstition, paganism, and falsehood. As such Religion encompassed not only individual salvation but also, and of equal importance, what we today refer to as the secular, the state, politics, economics, law, and science. Until the second half of the seventeenth century there was no powerful discourse on the nonreligious. Indeed, terms such as politics and economics were newly coined in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the term secular had a profoundly different nuance, for example, referring to the priesthood. Furthermore, the discourse on Religion as Christian Truth in contrast to superstition and paganism overlapped significantly with discourses on “our” civility, as opposed to “their” barbarity, and thus functioned as an expression of the superiority of the Christian male elite. Current uncritical practices of historians, political scientists, anthropologists, and religionists in their projection of modern Anglophone categories such as “religion,” “politics,” and “economics” as though they are eternal features of all human experience and social organisation indirectly and usually unconsciously serve the interests of the modern state under the guise of secular objectivity. Contents......Page 12 1. Introduction......Page 16 2. Methodology 1: The Critical Study of Religion......Page 56 3. Methodology 2: Religion and Secular, Sacred and Profane......Page 84 4. On Civility and Barbarity......Page 122 5. Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII’s Formularies of Faith......Page 156 6. English Historical Documents, 1485–1558......Page 178 7. Samuel Purchas, His Pilgrimage......Page 206 8. English Historical Documents, 1660–1832......Page 244 9. Religion, State, and American Constitutionalism......Page 280 10. Postscript on Civility and Barbarity in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries......Page 314 Notes......Page 326 Bibliography......Page 338 A......Page 350 B......Page 351 C......Page 352 E......Page 355 F......Page 356 H......Page 357 J......Page 358 L......Page 359 M......Page 360 P......Page 361 R......Page 363 S......Page 364 W......Page 366 Z......Page 367 Methodology 1: the critical study of religion Methodology 2: religion-secular; sacred-profane Discourses on civility and barbarity Formularies of faith English historical documents, 1485-1558 Samuel Purchas: his pilgrimage (1613, 1626) English historical documents, 1660-1832 Religion, state, and American constitutionalism Postscript on civility and barbarity in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is an analysis of the development of different meanings of the term 'religion' in different contexts and in relation to other categories with shifting and unstable nuances such as the state, politics, economics, and the secular