About the CRCN
The term ‘critical religion’ is shorthand for the theoretical and methodological practice of taking ‘religion’ not as an isolated stand-alone category but as a term in a configuration of related categories. From this viewpoint all powerful categories that are connected in specific discourses are problematic. The older discourse on Religion was concerned with Christian Truth, which was tied in a binary relationship with Pagan falsehood. Other dichotomies that have stood in as substitutes for the Religion-Pagan dichotomy are rationality-irrationality, civility-barbarity, and sometimes sacred-profane. In Anglophone texts since the 16th century rhetoric on Religion as Christian Truth is a totalizing discourse which usually implicitly or explicitly assumes civility, rationality, and even ‘being fully human’ in contrast with all those pagan and barbaric irrational superstitions.
A different more modern discourse on ‘religion’ seems to disconnect the meaning from Christian Truth and to transform it into a universal, which leads to the idea that religion is a neutral descriptive term, and that ‘religions’ are universal in time and space, being ubiquitous in all societies in all periods of history and even pre-history. In this discourse ‘religion’ is tied in binary opposition to the ’secular’ understood as the non-religious, a modern idea of which there are different domains such as ‘politics’, economics’, ‘the state’, and ’science’. This modern distinction between religion and the secular is found, for example, in Constitutions, where the Secular nation state grants rights to practice ones personal religion privately. The distinction between religion and the non-religious secular makes possible modern values such as human rights and ‘freedom of worship’.
These discourses are profoundly contradictory yet they persist side-by-side and remain largely unanalysed or confused in the same acts of rhetoric. The academic discipline of religious studies, and indeed all disciplines such as history and anthropology which uncritically reproduce discourses on ‘religion’ and ‘religions’, far from clarifying these confusions, actually institutionalise them and generate the illusion that ‘religion’ is a natural kind, unavoidable and in the nature of things. More tentatively the logic of this position points to a similar situation in such domains as ‘politics’ and ‘economics’. These academic disciplines, representing themselves as studying discrete domains of human practice only externally related to each other, thus act as agents for the reproduction of an ideological configuration under the guise of obective, disinterested description and analysis.
The purpose of this network and the workshops and conferences which it organises and promotes is to explore modern constructions of ‘religion’, ‘politics’, ‘the state’, economics’ in different sites of contestation to reveal their ideological function in the legitimation of the rationality of global capitalism.