WHAT IS CRITICAL RELIGION? This volume presents 26 short articles that span topics from stained glass to homosexuality to the Research Excellence Framework, and which have geographically diverse foci from Britain to Lebanon to Japan. What brings them together is that they all share a critical approach to the concept 'religion'. The word 'critical' here should be understood in a positive sense: scholars of Critical Religion seek to illuminate the various uses of the category 'religion' and reflect on the consequences that follow from some communities and their practices, texts, behaviours or objects being labelled as either 'religious' or 'non-religious'.
Critical Religion's entry point is the understanding that religion is not a thing that is simply there 'in the world'. While many people would claim that they know a religion 'when they see one', there are ongoing debates in Religious Studies on how to define the very subject of the discipline, or whether it should be defined, or whether in academic discourse we should even have a term 'religion' that is wrought with so many complexities and associations with conflict and violence.
Critical Religion emphasizes that the category religion has developed in a specific historical context. In particular, many of the current connotations of 'religion' have been shaped by enlightenment thinking and the assumption that there should be a private sphere of religion separate from the public sphere of politics. The idea of what 'religion' is was almost exclusively modelled on notions of Christianity and to a lesser degree Judaism and Islam, all monotheistic traditions that share common roots. Hence, when Europeans came into contact with other cultures, some of the practices they encountered were labelled as 'religious' on the basis of how much they resembled what they knew from back home.
Studies of Critical Religion have shown that these categorisations often failed to adequately reflect the cultural context in which they were situated. In particular, scholars of Critical Religion ask critical questions as to who benefits in these contexts from a specific understanding of religion and the construction of dichotomies such as religious/secular, emotional/rational, backward/civilised. For example, if monotheism is presented as the ideal representation of religion, some people or groups may seek to present their own tradition in line with this ideal to avoid being labelled as inferior. Or, if a law grants protection to some form of religion, there may be arguments as to whether a certain practice counts in this context as religion or not, directly linking definitions of religion to the enjoyment of or exclusion from certain privileges. This applies both to the colonial contexts and to contemporary debates on foreign policy, minority rights and civil liberties.
