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Contemporary theories of religion: A critical companion

This is an odd book. The word ‘contemporary’ entices; the ‘Introduction’, however, which delineates an extremely narrow theory of Theory and which attacks post-modernism by asserting that ‘along this path, the ironist, the critic, the writer replaces the theorist’ (p. 13) – though without actually engaging with the substance of any actual post-modern epistemological critiques whatsoever – seems rather to drag the reader into the heady days of the 1950s. The important works of Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding and Paul Feyerabend (and I name some of those impish post-modern types of scholar to be found in any contemporary, critical companion to the philosophy of science) clearly influenced only other people. Stausberg offers only a nod to that uncomfortable power–knowledge relation (p. 1) and that troublesome post–colonial observation that knowledge is produced within historical, social and ideologically saturated contexts (p. 3). But later Stausberg will suggest that this volume ‘is not the place for a sociology of knowledge of theorising religion’ (p. 10). No reasons are given as to why. One assumes that this move serves only to insulate a certain kind of theory of Theory from certain lines of critique. The position actually staked out with regard to what qualifies as proper, real, ‘scientific’ Theory of Religion (p. 7) turns out to have only four questions; the specificity of religion (is Religion a genus?), what are the origins of religion, what are its functions and finally, what is the structure of religion (do all religions have rituals, myths, offices, institutions, etc). Oddly, Stausberg claims that arguments about the definition of religion tend to disavow this kind of theory (p. 2), yet if one examines instances of theory that claim to explain the origin or the function of religion, those theories always depend on very precise definitions of what religion is (see for example, Tylor, Freud, Durkheim). Anyway, it is clear that the reader is, in a certain sense, being told what Theory is and what kinds of questions the study of religion, as a field, ought to be interested in. The reader interested in religions as sites of social action or as modes of articulation – the reader for whom no definition of religion is necessary beyond the statements and claims (i.e. the definitions) of real people – need read no further. Indeed, by the editor’s own admission, only three of the seventeen theories discussed actually have a basis in empirical research (p. 11).