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  • The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric
  • Lars Albinus
The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric. By Russel T. McCutcheon. Routledge, 2003. 317 pages. $120.00.

Russel T. McCutcheon is a man of a certain mission, making a great effort to free the academic study of religion from what he has argued to be the illusion of religious "meaning." Like his other books, The Discipline of Religion goes for the jugular of the discipline itself, claiming that the scientific discipline of religion is not a matter of neutral, theoretical research, but rather a matter of disciplining real people. With admirable energy McCutcheon pursues the possibility of redefining the whole scope of "religious studies," in his eyes better conceived as "cultural studies," so as to include the history of the academic study of religion itself. Foucault, by whom McCutcheon admits to have been inspired, has written that "For centuries, religion couldn't bear having its history told. Today, our schools of rationality balk at having their history written, which is no doubt significant" (Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York & London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988, 83). McCutcheon, taking the study of religion to be such a school of rationality, does not hesitate making this statement his own (58). As compared with Talal Asad, Richard King, and Tim Fitzgerald who, among others, have contributed to criticizing the Christian theological implications of the notion of religion, McCutcheon strives to go even further. The aim is not only to deal away with the apologetic stance of a phenomenological, let alone Eliadean approach to the study of religion, but also to question the secularism with which this study is intimately associated. The goal is to change the perspective from a [End Page 524] naïve or ideologically charged notion of religion as a reality sui generis to a critical, genealogical description of the social and historical conditions of possibility for defining something within the category of "religion" in the first place. McCutcheon thus understands the concept of "religion" as pertaining to a strategic, discursive space, which is constructed to confirm a certain social formation and structure of identity. In the author's own words: "it is the specific role played by a certain historic concept, 'religion', in structuring relations between self- and group-consciousness that is the pre-eminent concern" (8). This historic concept of "religion" is a Christian one and even in the academic use of it, a line can be drawn from a missionary and evolutionary representation of other cultures to a humanistic interest in the "self" and the "Human Nature." McCutcheon exchanges the question of the truth value of this discourse with a description of the political strategy that produces it, and refers, among others, to Roland Barthes and his talk of "the body rules and recipes." The main inspiration, however, comes from Michel Foucault and his historical genealogy or power analytics. Thus McCutcheon places himself in a Nietzschean tradition that reduces questions of truth to questions of power. The title of the book therefore has a double meaning. As a discipline "religion" is an academic activity that, in the line of a Christian and humanistic ideology, constructs a politically charged object of investigation. The study of religion—as well as the construct "religion" itself—is a way of disciplining other people (and other cultures).

McCutcheon appealingly opens his book referring to an archaeological revolution in Europe by the end of the seventeenth century. Where, earlier, private homes were usually built with multiple connected rooms that functioned as public thoroughfares, now, in the increasingly individualistic Renaissance, a new style of family houses was developed, where closed rooms around an internal corridor made it possible for the inhabitants to withdraw in real privacy. McCutcheon uses this well-chosen example to drive home his point that the distinction between "public" and "private" is not something natural, but an invention relating not solely to the structure of "home-making," but to society as such. The discourse of religion, creating notions of "spirituality," "faith," and "salvation" as pertaining to the individual in her own private being, is seen as analogical to the walls which, on the one hand, provide the individual with the option of...

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