The Sacred Is the Profane : The Political Nature of 'Religion'

The Sacred Is the Profane collects nine essays written over several years by William Arnal and Russell T. McCutcheon that share a convergent perspective: not simply that both the category and concept "religion" is a construct, something that we cannot assume to be "natural" or universal, but also that the ability to think and act "religiously" is, quite specifically, a modern, political category in its origins and effects, the mere by-product of the modern state. These collected essays, substantially rewritten for this volume, advance current scholarly debates on secularism-debates which, the authors argue, insufficiently theorize the sacred/secular, church/state, and private/public binaries by presupposing religion (often under the guise of such terms as "religiosity," "faith," or "spirituality") to historically precede the nation-state. The essays return, again and again, to the question of what "religion"--word and concept--accomplishes, now, for those who employ it, whether at the popular, political, or scholarly level. The focus here for two writers from seemingly different fields is on the efficacy, costs, and the tactical work carried out by dividing the world between religious and political, church and state, sacred and profane. It has become increasingly recognized in the field of religious studies that the very idea of “religion”—the founding concept of our area of study—is an idea with a history, specifically a modern and Western history. Yet this recognition has not extended beyond the narrow boundaries of theoretical discourse in the field, and so has had little influence on how “religious” data are actually described and studied, and even on how they are explained. This book argues that the concept of a particular, bounded, and distinctive realm of human behavior that can be designated as “religion” is a political invention of modernity, and that its salience persists only because of its continued political utility. In essence, “religion” is a modern folk category that derives its cogency only from Western political projects, and as such carries too much baggage to help us classify the imaginative productions of culture, a task for which it was never designed. This argument ends up being important in several ways: In this book's approach to the data, it designates “religious” and the kinds of analyses of this data that are found satisfying for theorizing “religion” as a human (i.e., nonsupernatural, but also more or less universal) phenomenon, and for the ways in which we understand our putatively non religious behaviors, symbols, and discourses __The Sacred Is the Profane__These collected essays, substantially rewritten for this volume, advance current scholarly debates on secularism-debates which, the authors argue, insufficiently theorize the sacred/secular, church/state, and private/public binaries by presupposing religion (often under the guise of such terms as "religiosity," "faith," or "spirituality") to historically precede the nation-state. The essays return, again and again, to the question of what "religion"--word and concept--accomplishes, now, for those who employ it, whether at the popular, political, or scholarly level. The focus here for two writers from seemingly different fields is on the efficacy, costs, and the tactical work carried out by dividing the world between religious and political, church and state, sacred and profane.