If we begin by considering the term ‘religion’, we find that, unlike the
situation that prevailed not too long ago, when it was a matter of choosing
among the multiple definitions available or of coming up with a new one, now
the very validity of the concept of ‘religion’ is being questioned. It is claimed,
in some cases, that, despite its pre-Christian Latin source, religio, ‘religion’ is
a Western, indeed a Christian, invention, and that therefore ‘religion’ cannot
be found beyond the confines of Christendom. Having been formulated for
the most part by scholars working in Europe—Timothy Fitzgerald, Daniel
Dubuisson, and the late Dario Sabbatucci—these views fall beyond the scope
of this essay. In the United States and Canada, the unease or outright rejection
of ‘religion’ as a category prevails mainly among academics influenced by
Jonathan Smith, some of whose essays, collected in Map is not Territory(1978),
Imagining Religion(1992) and Relating Religion(2004), have had a remarkable
impact. Some of that impact has been salutary, some of it less so. Insofar as
Smith has demanded that the student of religion be ‘relentlessly self-conscious’,
he has contributed to the questioning of the assumptions, many of them of a
theological nature, that pervade and in some ways constitute the field. But
while, regardless of their ultimate cogency—why should relentless self-
consciousness be demanded only of scholars of ‘religion’? How is ‘religion’
different from ‘art’, ‘history’ or ‘sexuality’? How does one know that one is
a scholar of ‘religion’ in the first place?—Smith’s theoretical and metatheoretical
positions have been advanced in a manner that not infrequently combines
insightfulness, erudition and wit, such qualities are seldom found among
Smith’s progeny. In many cases, in fact, attempts to argue along Smith’s lines
tend to consist of predictable variations upon a theme—the theme being
Smith’s notorious, italicized, claim that ‘there is no data for religion’, as well
as the two no less notorious dicta that follow it: ‘Religion is solely the creation
of the scholar’s study’, and, ‘Religion has no independent existence apart from
the academy’. One of the most deplorable consequences of these statements is
that some of Smith’s admirers seem to have taken his words as a prohibition
against studying anything that may appear as being ‘religious’ in its own terms;
that is, against occupying themselves with any event, person, utterance or object
that may appear as not depending upon the scholar’s sovereign agency in order
to be considered ‘religious’. The no less unfortunate result of this lack of
concern with ‘religions’—however, ‘imagined’, ‘invented’, ‘constructed’, or
‘manufactured’ these may be—is that some academics have ended up occupying
themselves in a single-minded manner with the denunciation of the past and
present ideologically cum theologically motivated misdeeds of scholars of
‘religion’ as well as of the organizations that comprise them—the latter being,
for all practical purposes, the American Academy of Religion. An exception
to this trend is found in Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion(1993/1999),
an insightful attempt to approach the definition of ‘religion’ from the
perspective of prototype theory.244
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES