Finally Drop the Term 'religion'!
Finally Drop the Term 'religion'!
Monday, 7 July 2025: 11:10
Location: ASJE018 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
In an attempt to enhance the critical sociologies of religion this is another call to drop the keyword ‘religion‘ in academic procedures. We, as scholars of the (critical) sociology of religion, can and should proceed without using this outworn and misleading term. Firstly, for fourty years authors have contributed to a growing body of scholarly literature that has questioned the use of the term “religion”. Secondly, talking without considering consequences contributes to the ongoing wrongdoing, year after year irresponsibly producing damages and victims. Third, as the newly exploded war zone in the Near East has shown, religion still serves particularly right wing extremists on all sides to camouflage their nude territorialist claims, and sometimes, their genocidal agenda. In the traditional and as well actual form the term religion serves them to mobilize supporters for their false claims.
Mitsutoshi Horii (2015): „The notion of ‘religion’ is utilized, with norms and imperatives, within particular historical, ideological, and cultural settings. In other words, any form of boundary making between religion and the non-religion secular serves specific norms and imperatives. The religious-secular dichotomy is not ideologically neutral. Thus, this dichotomy itself should be a subject of critical investigation.“ (Horii 2015:32) Dubuisson hints (Dubuisson 2016: 27) for representative works of authors arguing, „that [religion] doesn’t exist ...“, to „Asad 1993; King 1999, Fitzgerald 2000; McCutcheon 1997; 2001; 2003; Arnal and McCutcheon 2013; Masuzawa 2005; Smith 1982; 1987; 1993; 2004; Chidester 1996; Lincoln 2012; Balagangadhara 1994; Wiebe 1991; Bloch 2005; Hughes 2012; Dubuisson 2004 [1998]“.
Beyond the term ‚religion‘, Richard King has reminded: „Increasingly contemporary scholars of religion, influenced by feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and queer theories, have sought to denaturalize the established categories of scholarly analysis – those terms and approaches that have been mostly taken for granted by an earlier generation.“ (King 2013:139)
Mitsutoshi Horii (2015): „The notion of ‘religion’ is utilized, with norms and imperatives, within particular historical, ideological, and cultural settings. In other words, any form of boundary making between religion and the non-religion secular serves specific norms and imperatives. The religious-secular dichotomy is not ideologically neutral. Thus, this dichotomy itself should be a subject of critical investigation.“ (Horii 2015:32) Dubuisson hints (Dubuisson 2016: 27) for representative works of authors arguing, „that [religion] doesn’t exist ...“, to „Asad 1993; King 1999, Fitzgerald 2000; McCutcheon 1997; 2001; 2003; Arnal and McCutcheon 2013; Masuzawa 2005; Smith 1982; 1987; 1993; 2004; Chidester 1996; Lincoln 2012; Balagangadhara 1994; Wiebe 1991; Bloch 2005; Hughes 2012; Dubuisson 2004 [1998]“.
Beyond the term ‚religion‘, Richard King has reminded: „Increasingly contemporary scholars of religion, influenced by feminist, poststructuralist, postcolonial and queer theories, have sought to denaturalize the established categories of scholarly analysis – those terms and approaches that have been mostly taken for granted by an earlier generation.“ (King 2013:139)