The proliferation of secular religions

The term ‘secular religion’ first appeared in the description of modern totalitarian ideologies but soon became a general category applied to other political, socio-economic and cultural phenomena. The first problem with this approach is the inherent contradiction of the term, since ‘secular’ by all modern definitions means ‘non-religious’, making a secular religion something like a ‘nonreligious religion’. The second is the wide range of examples from communism to liberalism, from capitalism to ecology, or from transhumanism to social media, which suggests that with some creativity almost anything can be described as secular and religious at the same time. The first part of the paper deals with the terminological difficulties, while the second outlines the history of drawing secular-religious analogies, concluding that the ultimate failure to give a coherent narrative of secular religions is rooted in the impossibility of giving an adequate definition of religion in the first place.

The Circularity in Defining Religion

In this chapter Kocku von Stuckrad and Shaul Magid debate the utility of Magid’s initial definition that religion is, in many ways, a paradox, one that makes any definition of religion difficult to sustain. Von Stuckrad argues that such a definition risks reifying a certain form of religion and then assuming that its features are somehow general and universally applicable. He also argues that Magid’s definition attributes agency to religion when, in fact, religion does not actually do anything—social actors do. While agreeing to a certain extent, Magid counters with the claim that von Stuckrad does not place sufficient attention on issues of colonialism and imperialism.

Prologue I

Prologue I, God and Buckley at Yale (1951); Prologue II, Henry Sloan Coffin’s Yale (1897); Prologue III, Yale Embattled: Noah Porter versus William Graham Sumner (1880). Three historical vignettes in reverse historical order suggest changing stages regarding how Christianity might be related to a modern university. William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) challenged the university’s claims to be Christian. Defenders of Yale dismissed any anti-Christian influences in the curriculum as matters of academic freedom and pointed to the extracurricular religious influences at the university. When William Sloan Coffin (’97), who chaired a special committee to answer Buckley, was a student, a broad character-oriented Protestantism held a respected place among Yale students and faculty. Going back to 1880, though, it was no longer possible for the Yale President to insist on Christian teaching, as President Noah Porter discovered in his efforts to restrict the teachings of Social Darwinist William Graham Sumner. Despite the imminent disappearance of explicit Christian influences in public culture, it was possible with the broadened definition of religion to see the situation as the spread of religious enlightenment.

On the Theoretical-methodological Consequences of Essentialism in Definition of Religion and Ethnic Community

The article reveals the theoretical-methodological problems of combining essen­tialist attitudes in the definitions of religion and ethnic community. Essentialism assumes that an ethnic community has an essence that should be reflected in the theoretical constructions of scientists. At the same time, one of the essen­tial features of an ethnic community is supposed to be the presence of a unique culture, including religion. The essentialist understanding of religion is based either on overly narrow or overly broad definitions of it. The author comes to the conclusion that the simultaneous appeal to essentialism in relation to eth­nic community and to narrow essentialist definitions of religion (which, for ex­ample, does not include Buddhism) leads to the fact that an ethnic community can be spoken of only when its culture includes a pronounced religious compo­nent. In essentialism, an ethnic community is defined through a number of essen­tial features, including religion. However, the latter is defined so broadly that it becomes indistinguishable from morality and, consequently, loses its essence. This leads to a methodological impasse – the essence of the phenomenon is re­vealed through an appeal to the non-essential theoretical construct.

“Vai viņa daļa dzīvo manī?” Smokija Mo dziesmas “Kas ir radītājs” interpretācija popkultūras un reliģijas studiju kontekstā

The Russian hip hop artist Smoki Mo has frequently referenced religious and spiritual topics in his lyrics. The composition “Who is the creator” discusses the positive and negative replies to this question. The lyrics are interpreted as a popular culture text with the aim to discover how popular culture texts can function as religious ones and how popular culture can function as religion. The article employs a functional definition of religion to explore how the studied text discusses existential questions and struggle with identity that religion also is concerned with. The popular culture itself is understood in the article as the meaning and value that people ascribe to mass culture products, such as popular music, in their everyday lives. The article also summarizes the possible issues with reading popular culture texts as religious ones to avoid misinterpretation due to researcher’s indebtedness to traditional religious definitions or to scholarly traditions of interpretation. The article also employs the notion of spirituality to connect the ideas expressed in Smoki Mo’s lyrics to a relevant ideological framework. The understanding of the “creator”, “God” and other theological notions in the lyrics is closely related to the broad features of modern spirituality that include the focus on the individual self and universal statements rather than particular religious traditions. In this way, the studied composition in itself is an expression of modern spirituality dealing with existential questions.

The Central Characteristic of Religiosity Is Integration into a Moral Community, not Supernaturalism

Researchers often define religion according to the presence (vs. absence) of supernaturalism. This has several serious shortcomings: (1) it construes religion narrowly as a historical/anthropological phenomenon, (2) it ignores the underlying evolved cognitive mechanisms facilitating tight group membership, which operate regardless of belief content and (3) it ensures that the study of religion will be obsolete if secularization continues. Instead of a slavish adherence to the criteria of supernaturalism, I suggest here a broader and more evolutionarily-informed definition of religion (and secularity): religion is what emerges when individuals become highly (perhaps overly-) integrated into a moral community; secularity is what emerges when individuals are moderately (perhaps under-) integrated into a moral community.

Should Ethical Vegans Have a Beef with the Definition of Religion?

Veganism, where adherents eschew the consumption of animals or their by-products, has seen a substantial increase in popularity in recent years. Vegans who follow the diet for moral or ethical reasons (ethical vegans) have argued in the United States, with limited success and, more recently, in the United Kingdom that they should be protected from discrimination on the grounds of their adherence to ethical veganism, contending that ethical veganism should be subject to similar protections as religion. In the United Kingdom, anti-discrimination legislation protects philosophical beliefs in addition to religion and it was recently held in a preliminary hearing in Casamitjana v The League Against Cruel Sports that ethical veganism falls within the ambit of the relevant statute. The authors examine the situation in the United Kingdom and the United States and conclude that, given that Australian anti-discrimination statutes only refer to religion as a protected attribute, this outcome is unlikely to be replicated since veganism is highly unlikely to meet the current definition of religion.

No Place to Stand

Religion scholar Mircea Eliade held that the “question of character of place on which one stands is the fundamental question.” Smith engages the idea of place in developing a definition of religion as well as holding that the scholar’s selection of theory determines a study’s results. In a classic Smith position he outlined two kinds of maps common to religions, locative (place embracing) and utopian (place avoiding). The chapter shows that these are mirrors of one another and that neither is actually achievable. The chapter focuses then on Smith’s third unnamed mapping strategy that is akin to joke and play, arguing that play is fundamental to Smith’s theories of place, myth, and ritual. Religions are understood in terms of application and adjustment, the iterative, negotiative, interactive dynamics of play. Furthermore, the chapter argues that, following Smith, this same dynamic is at the core of a proper academic study of religion.

Toward a Volitional Definition of Religion

This article advocates for the production of stipulative definitions of religion, a type of nominal definition that articulates new ways of applying a word to a thing. I propose that scholars look to sites where phenomena historically have been labeled “religion” on lexical or real understandings of the term, this to query how religious agents there chose, implicitly or explicitly, to systematize thought, speech, emotion, and action. Such self-consciously ordered systems, I argue, may properly be labeled “religion.” Next, I apply this method to premodern South Asia, suggesting “religion” refers to the second-order structuring there that links normative social relations to normative states of subjectivity, any innovation in the one demanding innovation in the other. I conclude by inviting other efforts at stipulative definition, all with an eye toward an inductive approach, allowing that the myriad locations of religion present mutually distinguishable systems that may all properly be so labeled.