When is Religion?
Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash
In late 2019, I had the pleasure of presenting at a seminar on idolatry alongside William Cavanaugh for the Institute for Ethics and Society at the University of Notre Dame. As an aside, I also had the pleasure of working for a year as a Visiting Professor at the Center for World Catholicism at DePaul University, which Cavanaugh still directs.
Cavanaugh started the day at Notre Dame by presenting the thematic threads of the project. I ended the day by developing one of the topics from my doctoral thesis concerning the use of the vocabulary of theological orthodoxy to champion primarily secular concerns generated by partisan political entrepreneurs to win combox wars.
Before the seminar, I unexpectedly joined my colleague Peter Holmes in interviewing Cavanaugh for the podcast This Catholic Life, which is hosted by the Archdiocese of Sydney.
While we did look at some biographical details, the interview focused on the fraught border that many say divide the religious and secular. What became evident in the interview (at least to my mind) is that how one conceives the “religious” and the “secular” very much depends on the time period within which the word “religion” is used, which corresponds also to the reconfigurations of civic and political power. “Religion” as we understand it now, I suggested, became a naughty corner designated by these powers.
The interview went some way to suggest that the sharpness of the distinction between the “religious” and the “secular” is more of a myth than reality. Many social phenomena then and now, which we would normally associate with the “secular”, display characteristics which we would describe as “religious”, but are set aside from analysis of religion because of their lack of “obviously religious” claims.
In short, we are not losing our religion but relocating it.
One of these phenomena which we looked at in the interview was shopping. This was driven by one of Cavanaugh’s claims in Being Consumed, that our market driven economy is not undergirded by materialism, which implies that one can be satisfied by the acquisition of material abundance. Rather, Cavanaugh suggested that our market economy’s guiding principle is summarised by a phrase coined in 1929 by General Motors CEO Charles Kettering. This is the “organised creation of dissatisfaction”, where we are trained to treat all that we want as unwanted upon acquisition.
Listen to the full interview here. I also have another interview with This Catholic Life on my book on theology and zombies. Do check them out.
Support Awkward Asian Theologian on Patreon, and help make a change to the theological web.
