In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CHAPTER 9 Talking Past Each Other: The Issue of Public Intellectuals Revisited In 1998, the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion kindly invited me to reply to the unsolicited comments that an earlier version of the previous chapter prompted from Paul Griffiths at the University of Chicago (1998b) and June O'Connor at the University of California , Riverside (1998). Given the amount of material that crosses our desks and our computers every day, it is flattering to find that one's writing has not only been read by one's peers but has prompted them to take the time to compose and submit a reply for publication.I MAN BITES DOG I find Paul Griffiths's reply troubling because it sidesteps argumentation and is instead based on assertions that simply dismiss my essay as, in his words, naive and deeply confused. Griffiths waxes paternalistic in likening me to a "dog wagging his tail after having learned a new trick," confessing that he found himself "wanting to pat McCutcheon on the head for being so eagerly pleased with himself." This rather biting tone, which is pretty much repeated in his review of my book (1998)2 Manufacturing Religion, can also be found in an unsigned review of my book that ran in The Christian Century, where the writer not only misrepresents my thesis but also expresses incredulity that I could even hold such a position.3 After reading these two reviews and Griffiths's reply to my essay, I tried to envision what would have happened to my own essay had I engaged in such emotional rhetoric and simply dismissed positions with which I disagreed. I presume that my submission would not even have made it to the stage of anonymous review, much less be published in the academy's journal. In fact, were I to dismiss opinions different from mine as nothing but mere silliness, I do not think I would ever have been motivated to reply to Griffiths in print. Taking such criticisms seriously, however, presents a challenge: how 145 146 CULTURE CRITICS AND CARETAKERS can one reply to this sort of ad hominem attack without either sanctioning it or, even worse, simply reproducing it? Engaging such critics on their own rhetorical level serves no purpose that I can see to be of any benefit either to me or the reader. Therefore, I would rather reply by making the style of the critique itself my datum, since his critique itself has little or no actual substance. Given that my brand of scholarship on religion, at least in the AAR, certainly does not represent the vast majority of people (if only my position was as "sadly common" as Griffiths claims it to be!), it is surprising that my publications inspire such emotion. Come to think of it, though, such reactions are quite predictable. In fact, had my writing not prompted such a reaction, I might have feared that I was doing something wrong. After all, my critique concerns the manner in which the field, as well as its datum, is conceptualized, institutionalized, and, by extension, the social role and privilege of scholars working within just these institutions with just these conceptual tools and categories. I therefore welcome such absurd overreactions because they provide better confirmation for my critique than any of the data I could ever come up with on my own; as Chomsky wrote, "[t]he system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage , though it is often masked in other terms" (1991: 9). Apart from his paternalism and outright sarcasm, readers should notice a crucial rhetorical move Griffiths makes: he transfers my original sociopolitical argument to the realm of disembodied ideas and beliefs (i.e., metaphysics), a place of no place, where scholars of religion usually feel quite at home. Although it is implicit in his reply, his review of my book states quite explicitly that "everything is in the end and in the beginning, theology" (1998a: 48). His argument, then, seems to be that since we all have pretheoretical commitments, interests, and values, we are all religious, and therefore we are all doing theology. I would hope that the futility of this sort of reasoning is clear to readers: (i) as the old saying goes, if everything is theology, then 'theology' is an utterly useless and meaningless signifier; and (ii...

Share