Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion <i>with</i> Religion

Reply 2. True Religion — A Response to Drew M. Dalton

205 Chapter4,Reply2 True Religion —A Response to Drew M. Dalton BruceEllisBenson was more than a bit dismayed when a Google search for “true religion”cameupwiththisnumberoneitem:“jeans.”Perhapsin our capitalist culture in which everything becomes a commodity I should not have expected any more: but jeans?1 The occasion for the search was that I remembered there was a verse somewhere in the New Testament in which true religion is named and described. Given that I did not have a concordance at hand, I thought I would rely on the Internet. Fortunately, it did land me (further down the list) at the right verse: James 1:27. Yet this got me thinking about exactly what is being omitted in “religion without religion.” Slavoj Žižek is (in)famous for the following observation: “On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine , cream without fat, beer without alcohol....And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare?”2 It does not take much thought to realize that “religion without religion” could quite naturally be added to this list. But this immediately raises the following question: what is the “malignant property” that would lead anyone to want a religion that I 206 Bruce Ellis Benson has somehow been deprived of that property? Put otherwise, and more completely: on the one hand, why is religion so “bad” that we want it purged and, on the other hand, valuable enough that we want it somehow still preserved? Would it not be simpler to jettison the whole thing, and thus bypass the extraction process? In what follows, I want to answer that question. It will not be immediately obvious that my response to Drew Dalton is truly an engagement with his chapter. However, the tie to that chapter will become amply clear. Thus, what I say should be read as thinking alongside of Dalton, situating his point in a wider context. Although Derrida does not speak explicitly of a “malignant property ” when he raises the possibility of having a religion without religion , he does speak of the alternative as being a “nondogmatic doublet of dogma.”3 The offending term here, “dogma,” can be benignly defined as “that which is held as an opinion” or, less benignly, as “a belief, principle, tenet; esp. a tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down by a particular church, sect, or school of thought.” But surely what Derrida also has in mind is what the OED lexicographers go on to add: “sometimes, depreciatingly, an imperious or arrogant declaration of opinion.”4 Given this definition, there are two aspects to the problem of dogma. On the one hand, it has positive content —whether a belief, principle, or tenet—that (by its very nature) is more or less definitive. On the other hand, it is held in a way that declares it absolutely true and the proclaimer thereof absolutely right. It is both the content and the way in which it is presented that offend. In Derrida’s and Caputo’s versions of “without,” each of these is diminished. The content is reduced to a secret or to that which cannot be named or to a mystery. Each of them sees this new version of religion as moving away from a rigid system of beliefs and any kind of magisterium that would give us anything like final pronouncements. Explicitly, Derrida speaks of “religion” as “a set of beliefs, dogmas, or institutions.”5 As a way of escaping from this definitive content and prescribing a way to “hold” the much less defined content, Derrida speaks of “faith.” Having “faith” means both that what one believes in is not readily defined or mastered and also that one lacks certainty and naturally would then avoid the arrogance of insisting that one’s way of belief is truly normative for others. Such a move makes perfect sense as long as we assume that this definition of religion is correct—that the Christian religion is composed True Religion 207 of a particular set of propositions, a particular body of believers, and various institutions to regulate and define the boundaries of said religion . Yet what if “religion”—at least in Christian terms—is something else? Consider how the book of James defines religion: “Religion that...