“What is critical religion?” A Response to Galen Watts and Sharday Mosurinjohn, “Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules?”

What is it about?

This paper is a discussion and a Response to Galen Watts and Sharday Mosurinjohn, (2022) “Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules? Why There Must Be More Ways to Be “Critical” in the Study of Religion”. Whatever else critical religion might or might not be, nothing could be more important than a critical inquiry into the categories that powerfully organise our knowledge and our institutions, including our universities. They bring into the mainstream significant topics that are habitually marginalised.Their article, however, is marred by reification and contradiction. They set up Russell McCutcheon, Craig Martin and Timothy Fitzgerald as the core of an imaginary school, fail to identify our differences, and then when they stumble on a disagreement between us, they accuse us of inconsistency! I explain why I have habitually used the term ‘critical religion’, and why I have recently considered abandoning it. I point out that the authors never properly discuss the genesis of the discourse on the non-religious secular, which is fundamental to any serious attempt to understand ‘critical religion’. They ignore my work on India and Japan related to colonial imposition. They do not consider that religion is one of a configuration of empty categories, including politics, nature, the economy, and the nation, a signalling system that promotes the hegemonic illusions of liberal enlightenment modernity. However, these shortcomings should not deter us from taking forward their work.

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