Religion as an unstable category in religious studies discourse

Abstract

The article discusses contemporary critiques of the category of religion. According to a group of scholars specializing in the study of religion, “religion” is a recent European invention that evolved within Western Christianity and was then imposed on other cultures. Not only does the term “religion” distort the cultural phenomena to which it is applied by essentializing other ways of living and separating religion from other fields of culture, it also carries Christian meanings and is ideologically loaded, serving the purposes of those who brought it into being. To illustrate contemporary criticism of this category, the article refers to three scholars of religion: Timothy Fitzgerald, Daniel Dubuisson and Pascal Boyer. While their work helps us to understand the origins and limitations of the modern category of religion, their assertion that religion is a harmful and useless category in the study of religion is problematic. However, this article does not seek to evaluate the validity of these postulates, but rather to demonstrate that the destabilization of the category of religion is itself ideologically conditioned and an expression of the mentality of the late modern era.