What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religionteach Us About the Future

What Can the Failure of Cog-Sci of Religion Teach Us about the Future of Religious Studies?

Ivan Strenski

Abstract

Despite its claims to novelty, the cognitive science of religion proceeds by ignoring major works of criticism of religious studies’ fundamental categories, especially that of “religion.” Accordingly, cognitive science of religion defines “religion” variously as the concern for “supernatural beings” or agent causality – both mere variants on E.B. Tylor’s mid-nineteenth century theory of animism. Furthermore, cognitive science of religion commits itself to a narrow – experimental, laboratory – conception of “science,” the results of which seem, at best, trivial. Taken together, both liabilities of cognitive science of religion spell its failure. The author charts an alternative scientific future for the study of religion by recommending a renewed effort in the historical sciences.

Keywords cognitive science of religion – experimental science – laboratory science – Russell McCutcheon – Armin Geertz – XXth World Congress IAHR – Marice Bloch – Donald Wiebe – Luther Martin – history – critique of categories

Recently the ambitions of the cognitive science of religion (hereafter, CSR) ar- ticulated by Donald Wiebe and Luther Martin have been challenged by Russell McCutcheon.1 In its quest for ahistorical human universals, McCutcheon has called attention to CSR’s conspicuous failure to address the historical construc- tion of the concept of religion, much less, even, the publications produced in its name. In effect, CSR has totally ignored the decades of work that the likes of Talal Asad, Tim Fitzgerald, I and, indeed, McCutcheon himself, have devoted

1 Russell McCutcheon, “Everything Old Is New,” in Failure and Nerve in the Academic Study of Religion, W. Arnal, W. Braun, and R.T. McCutcheon (eds.), 78–94. Sheffield: Equinox (2012); Donald Wiebe and Luther H. Martin (2012) “Religious Studies as a Scientific Discipline: The Persistence of a Delusion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80(3): 587–97.

© KoninklijkeBrillNV,Leiden, 2018 | DOI10.1163/9789004372436_010 AbouttheFutureofReligiousStudies 207 to the critical interrogation of the principal categories of the study of religion.2 Here, above all, is the concept of religion itself, which Asad, Fitzgerald, and McCutcheon have labored so hard to deconstruct, and arguably eliminate. But, likewise, we find fundamental categories such as myth, power, politics, sacrifice, and religion as well, that I have subjected to rigorous critical, historical interrogation.3 Instead, CSR has brought the new data of brain research and evolutionary psychology to bear on a creaking, and increasingly elastic, quasi-Tylorian concept of religion as the belief in superior beings. On the oth- er hand, Wiebe has argued that McCutcheon’s critical work has proved sterile in that it makes constructive work on religion impossible by making conceptual criticism an end in itself. I propose a way of reconciling the extremes of CSR’s inveterate universalism and McCutcheon’s self-consuming criticism. For its part, CSR needs to com- promise, for the moment, at least, by accepting the limitations consequent to local contextualization. For their part, the conceptual critics need to put categories to use, even if one can imagine their being superseded.

1 Critiques of CSR: McCutcheon’s, Plus

The gist of McCutcheon’s argument against CSR is its total disregard for critique of the constructed category of “religion.” Instead, CSR cuts through everything McCutcheon, in effect, has written on the subject, and uses “the old troublesome folk notion of religion: belief in supernatural agents.”4 That those purporting to be scientists should then magically think all their problems are

2 Talal Asad (1993), Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Timothy Fitzgerald (1997), “A Critique of ‘Religion’ as a Cross-Cultural Category,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 9(2): 91– 110; Russell McCutcheon (1997), Manufacturing Religion:The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press. 3 Ivan Strenski (1987), Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. London/Iowa City: Macmillan/Iowa University Press; (1996a), “Between Theory and Speciality: Sacrifice in the 90’s,” Religious Studies Review 22: 10–20; (1996b) “The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max Müller,” In Myth and Method, W. Doniger and L. Patton (eds.), 52–81. Charlottesville: University of Virginia; (1998), “Religion, Power and the Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66(2): 345–68; (2002), Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought in France, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; (2003), Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice. Leiden: E.J. Brill; (2010), Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics. Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell. 4 McCutcheon 2012, 87.