A simple point that I like to make on the first day of any
Religious Studies course is the following: this is not a "spiritual
shopping store." I make this point by stressing what we are not doing in
the course: we are not searching for the truth about religion.
When some students first think about taking a class on
religion they often do so under the assumption that Religious Studies will help
them navigate between the different religions of the world, and thereby make
wise spiritual choices in their personal lives. These students tend to think of
Religious Studies as an aid to help them choose the best religion ("Buddhism
vs. Islam, Yah!") or as an aid to overcome religious institutions all
together and be an informed spiritual agnostic ("I took a class on
religion once and saw that it is all made up, so now I am spiritual but not
religious"). This popular approach to the subject is what leads students
to think of the Religious Studies classroom as a "spiritual shopping store"—a
way of learning the truth about religion, or life, for that matter. They enroll
in a religion class to read books on mysticism because they think that is what
real religion looks like ("OMG, Saint Francis of Assisi was the real deal,
everything else is just hypocrisy"). Or, to study Jainism because they
think the idea of ahimsa is the only
truth that can save our confused world ("non-violence is the only
answer").
To underline the fact that this "spiritual shopping
store" approach is not what we are doing in class, I like to show the
following clip from Woody Allen's 1984 movie, Hannah and Her Sisters. Now, I love Allen and I love this movie,
but it is a perfect example of how not to approach Religious Studies:
I use this clip to introduce students to the a priori assumptions they may have about
religion, as it provides a perfect example of what Timothy Fitzgerald calls The Ideology of Religious Studies. If you watch the clip closely, you will
notice that Allen imagines religion to be a private space of belief, a
sanctuary of meaning and value in a desolate secular world. In the clip he peruses different religions as
if they were objects in a spiritual market place of divine meaning. Of course, this is a very modern understanding
of religion and it is quite common in popular culture, so I am not faulting
Allen for presenting religion in this manner, but it is an approach that
doesn’t help us understand the discursive role religion plays in our modern
world. What is ignored in this shopping store approach to religion is all the
political, historical, and cultural elements that make this private
interpretation of religion possible in the first place.
In contrast to this "spiritual shopping store"
approach to Religious Studies, I stress that we are going to analyze all the
social elements that make viewing religion possible. Echoing Slavoj Žižek in The Perverts Guide to Cinema, I tell them to become religion
perverts: I want them to peer behind the
surface image of religion that is presented in textbooks and popular culture
and look closely at how discourse on religion is presented. We are not
analyzing religion in order to a attain a true description of the world, but in
an attempt to view how the very concept of religion functions. This reverses
the shopping store approach to Religious Studies by placing students on the
margins of religious discourse, so to speak, as critics. Contrary to the above
clip from Hannah and Her Sisters, the
students are not to approach religion as confused practitioners searching for
the secret key to the universe, but as spectators viewing a series of images
that are defined as religious. How does religion function in the market place
of cultural meaning? What kind of work does it do for people like Allen who
have a particular type of world they want to sustain, or understand? As Zizek
suggests in relation to filmic reality, the goal of critical analysis is not to
generate some kind of "fake fast food religious experience" by
getting beyond illusion and touching the real, but by peering inside the
construction of illusion itself,
observing its production and moving parts.
So, welcome back, but be forewarned, this class is not a
"spiritual shopping store"... it is a sustained lesson in the pervert
art of critical analysis.
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