What Is Religion? Debating the Academic Study of Religion, provides original insights into the scholarly discourse on definitions of religion. The editors of the volume, Aaron W. Hughes and Russell T. McCutcheon, bring together seventeen established scholars of religion from different areas of expertise both to offer their respective accounts of “religion” and to comment on the other’s definitions. Thus, the book represents a conversation between various voices, one that engages divergent discourses within the field of religious studies. Each of the chapters starts with one scholar’s short definition of religion followed by a response from a second scholar and then an answer by the first. This format illuminates the similarities and differences between a range of approaches towards religion, as well as addresses a number of controversial questions. The introduction explains the aims and the structure of the volume (and in particular the three-part structure of each chapter), and the book concludes with an appendix compiled by the editors, offering a large number of further definitions by renowned scholars of religion, past and present.
Despite the book’s one-by-one treatment of individual definitions of religion, several discussion lines and areas of tension recur throughout. The volume confronts the reader with some long-standing, but seemingly still virulent, debates. For an audience acquainted with the discipline, this may sometimes seem astonishing and somewhat tedious. I will outline three such debates here, although they are all entangled. First, throughout the volume, the reader repeatedly encounters a tension between the emphasis on the constructed character of “religion” and the urge to provide a substantial definition of some kind. On the one hand, the book reruns well-known findings about the Western origin of the category of religion, its colonialist legacy, and the related problems in applying the concept, as well as the resulting need to investigate the discourses in which “religion” is generated. On the other hand, however, many of the definitions provided are substantial, seemingly offering genuine insight into the nature of religion, or at least into the phenomena they encounter in their studies.
A second but interlinked debate concerns the proper status and function of definitions of religion within the literature. Should a definition describe and clearly demarcate the object of study? Or ought it rather be a strategic category designed to initiate an investigation without claiming to represent reality objectively? Can or should it be defined at all? This leads to a third field of discussion concerning the role of the scholar. Several chapters discuss whether researchers are entitled to bring definitions of religion to the field and how doing so affects it. Is it, for example, helpful in a historical context to make use of the category of “religion” even if it did not originally exist in this context? And, relatedly, what is the relationship between emic and scholarly definitions of religion? All of this is debated from a wide variety of perspectives—sociological, philosophical, psychological, historical, and aesthetical, among others – which is in principle enriching, but tends to make the discussion inconsistent.
The book presents the reader with an original and innovative account of current approaches to, and controversies within, religious studies, gathering and interlinking multifaceted voices. Still, there are some flaws. The concisely formulated initial definitions offer the reader a good entry into the chapters, but more elaboration before the responses would have been helpful. Occasionally, the responses themselves provide such explanations, but they do not necessarily accord with an author’s original understanding. As a result, in their closing statements, the authors often end up either affirming or correcting the responders, which could have been easily preempted with more detailed initial definitions.
Additionally, while the book surely presents interesting insights into the current study of religion, I imagine it will be difficult for newcomers to the field to understand. Many of the chapters discuss different aspects of several topics instead of presenting one coherent argument. Thus, while many debates and discourses surrounding the matter of religion are mentioned, only those with sufficient prior knowledge can fully understand the underlying issues because they are often not explained in detail.
Finally, it is sometimes hard for the reader to contextualize both the definitions and their critiques because little information is provided concerning the contributors’ research fields and areas of expertise. Given the widely agreed-upon presupposition that there can be no universally valid definition of religion, it seems difficult to evaluate a definition abstractly. Its usefulness can only be judged in a concrete study. Despite the volume’s promising approach and coverage of a variety of perspectives, it would need more revising work to get more coherent and profitable for the reader.
Hannah Griese is a doctoral student in the study of religion at the University of Munich (LMU).
Hannah Griese
Date Of Review:
February 17, 2023