Caretakers Still? Reconsidering McCutcheon's Redescription of the Public Study of Religion

Bibliographic Data

ID20164682
AuthorsLoren D Lybarger (Ohio University Athens Ohio USA, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume51
Issue1
Pages101-104
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligious Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0319-485X • E-ISSN: 1748-0922
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/rsr.17646
OpenAlexW4410520521
LanguageEN
References cited12

CRITICS NOT CARETAKERS: REDESCRIBING THE PUBLIC STUDY OF RELIGION, SECOND EDITION. By Russell T. McCutcheon. London: Routledge, 2024. Pp. x + 363. Paper, $49.99 The publication of the second edition of Russell T. McCutcheon's Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion ([2001] 2024)—a book that sparked controversy when it first appeared—raises the question of its continuing relevance. Do the issues it addresses—hotly contested during the 1990s—still matter? McCutcheon offers three responses to this question in the introduction to this new edition: First, he says he deserves “a second chance to make a first impression” (xv). Critics and even sympathetic readers, he claims, misunderstood his basic point the first time around.1 A second edition allows him to clear up confusion. Next, the central issue the first edition highlighted remains scandalously salient. “The vast majority of scholars of religion,” he says, still play caretaker: They interpret, translate, and mediate the claims of religious practitioners rather than subject them to de-naturalizing critique (xi-xii and xiv). Finally, McCutcheon asserts that a second edition will help a new generation of readers glimpse these problems and appreciate the historical origins of the debate that he insists we still must have. So, do these justifications for a second edition hold up? Have readers in the field (intentionally or not) misunderstood and misconstrued McCutcheon's arguments? Have they continued to play the role of caretaking ideologists rather than principled critics of religious obfuscations of power? Do they still require, and will they purchase, the stiff medicine McCutcheon prescribes in this updated volume? And, can the book serve usefully as an archive for a new generation of scholars who must contend with the field's lingering refusal, as McCutcheon sees it, to acknowledge the all-too-human origins and ideological functions of religion? Taking that final question first, the second edition of Critics Not Caretakers can indeed serve as a useful resource. It can do so in two ways, such as by providing the historical perspective McCutcheon claims the book offers and by supplying still-relevant practical guidance—including book and film recommendations—for how to teach courses in the style of religious studies that McCutcheon advocates. McCutcheon achieves his goal of furnishing a historical perspective by preserving the original fourteen chapters of the earlier edition intact. These chapters give readers of the second edition a window into the debates that roiled the field during the 1990s and early 2000s. McCutcheon has included new material, as well—a foreword and introduction to the second edition; a new chapter on “studying religion as part of the humanities;” introductions and footnotes that contextualize, update, and argue for the continuing relevancy of the issues that each of the original chapters addresses; and a new concluding afterword. The utility of this approach becomes especially apparent in the chapters that address teaching. It is in these chapters that McCutcheon—who avoids positive theorizing about religion, preferring instead to play the gadfly—offers a constructive, detailed vision for religious studies. His suggestions for techniques and materials remain useful and interesting despite the passage of time. They also provide a helpful foil for our continuing debates about what we should be doing in our classrooms. McCutcheon has strong opinions. He sees the mission of teaching in religious studies as producing “good scholars” (241), by which he means gadflies—“scholars as social provocateurs” (245)—committed to analyzing how human communities create and maintain ideological boundaries in the interest of obtaining, reinforcing, and exercising power. “We are culture critics [...],” he explains, “presuming that social authority and identity are generated and regenerated by means of social rhetorics that extract claims, practices, and institutions from historical pressures and causes” (245–246). One might argue that this vision of religious studies teaching constitutes a much too doctrinaire conception of our work in the classroom. The reduction of religion to ideology forecloses other possible constructions of the object of our study. In doing so, it preemptively limits answers we might give to the question of what religion is even before we can raise it for discussion in our teaching. Regardless, McCutcheon's strong claims have the virtue of getting us talking about what we mean and what we are doing when teaching about religion. Gadflies have their purpose and value. To his further credit, McCutcheon goes beyond bald assertions to offer concrete proposals for how to teach undergraduate students the reflexes of a culture critic as he conceives this role. Chapter Thirteen: Methods and Theories in the Classroom, for example, provides still-relevant thought-provoking ideas for how to get undergraduates thinking critically about ritual. For example, he describes using the Blues Traveler song, “Hook,” to help students understand the point that ritual forms carry no intrinsic meaning but rather serve as vehicles for instilling any manner of ideological intent and content, whether “sacred” or “secular”—and problematizing this distinction is very much McCutcheon's point. In this same chapter, McCutcheon surveys different textbooks he has found especially effective, such as Ronald Grimes's Readings in Ritual Studies (Grimes 1996), which he says would pair well with a standard world religions textbook or with Daniel Pals's survey of social theories of religion (Pals 2022). The Grimes book, as McCutcheon describes it, helps students classify rituals from across religious traditions into various comparative and analytic categories (action, time, space, healing, etc.). This approach sparks questions about what rituals do as opposed to what they might mean cross-culturally. McCutcheon's other chapters on teaching, including the one on religion and film, offer similar specific and still useful suggestions for cultivating a critical and comparative approach in the classroom. The texts and materials McCutcheon surveys in these teaching chapters date to the 1990s, but he also cites recent work in new footnotes and parenthetical in-text citations. Taken together, these updates, along with the original text, still feel relevant and useful and should provide a helpful resource to anyone teaching courses on topics like theories of religion, ritual practices, myth and symbolism, and religion and film. What then of those other questions that McCutcheon's second edition of Critics Not Caretakers raises: that is, whether religious studies scholars have (willfully) misunderstood him and, in doing so, have remained “caretakers” of religion and not “critics” of power-obfuscating ideologies? Do we religious studies scholars still require McCutcheon's medicine? Answers to these questions depend on whether one agrees with McCutcheon's claim that caretaking remains the dominant ethos of the field. They also rely on whether we accept McCutcheon's assertion that the only legitimate religious studies scholarship is that which views religion as ideology and engages in its critique. Aware that he needs to make the case, McCutcheon reinforces his claims about the field in his new chapter on religion and the humanities for the second edition. There he argues that the attempt to establish religious studies as part of the humanities has perpetuated a type of Eliadean phenomenology.2 This Eliadeanism sees religion as pointing to an independent, universal structure of meaning. McCutcheon detects such lingering assumptions about meaning in assertions, such as those Wendy Doniger has made, about how studying other people's myths enables us to learn something about ourselves (11). Against this idea, McCutcheon advocates the “critical religion” approach for which he sees his own work as laying a foundation. This critical standpoint roots itself in the human sciences, which ask different, more limited, and down-to-earth questions about how groups form and perpetuate themselves, how they come to an end, and how they authorize specific actors and discourses (13). Unfortunately, asserts McCutcheon, too few religious studies scholars embrace this critical stance even today. Thus, the need for the new edition of Critics Not Caretakers. McCutcheon's arguments in this vein break little new ground, and it is hardly the case that critical religion remains a marginal perspective. Weber addressed questions about “objectivity” and method and the distinction between scholarship and advocacy at the turn of the last century. We have been debating these issues ever since. Moreover, following the reaction against Eliade and the absorption of the postmodern and postcolonial critical turn during the 1990s, the non-theological study of religion has largely abandoned broad assertions about a human spirit or universal structure of meaning that religious traditions supposedly reflect. In its place, the field has embraced the critical spirit and its twin, the Nietzschean hermeneutics of suspicion, making them a default setting for any discussion of what religion does in the world today. Good examples of this shift include the Asadians (Asad 1993, 2003; Mahmood 2005, 2006, 2010, 2016; Scott and Hirschkind 2006; Sullivan et al. 2015; among others) as well as the Foucauldian approaches taken recently in Sheldon et al. (2023) and Fuerst and Goodwin (2024). Contrary to McCutcheon's view of matters, the field appears in no immediate danger of backsliding into quasi-theological or humanist assertions about an essential religious reality or universal meaning in the world. Nevertheless, frustration with the critical turn and the infinite regress its antifoundationalism engenders has mounted in the field. One concern animating the impatience stems from the need to explain the global resurgence of religion despite very real, documentable processes of secularization. Critical deconstruction can reveal the underlying mechanisms of power that religions might obscure or justify. Still, it cannot explain the contemporary persistence of religion without, in the end, resorting to functionalist assertions or claims of false consciousness. Several new approaches have emerged in response, arguing for the need to theorize religion as a subjectively meaningful system of practices that independently shapes social realities. Tweed's (2006) approach, in which he delimits religions as “confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and suprahuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries,” provides one example. Tweed took as his starting point the ways in which immigrant and refugee communities engaged in religious practices to survive and transform their experiences of dislocation. Another approach has emerged in cognitive theories that define religion as comprising practices predicated on belief in superhuman agents. In this view, these beliefs emerge as a function of the basic human social-cognitive disposition to attribute agency to phenomena in the world, including phenomena perceived as otherwise unexplainable or supranormal (Mackey 2022, xv–xvi and 1–23). Religion persists across time and place because of this fundamental human proclivity to assign agency. Yet a third approach, rooted in interpretive (Weberian) sociology, began appearing in the lecturing and writing of Martin Riesebrodt, who was a colleague of Bruce Lincoln—one of McCutcheon's guiding lights—at the University of Chicago, starting in the 1990s. Riesebrodt acknowledged the necessity to critique essentialist claims but argued that, ultimately, the critical turn proved a dead end for understanding and explaining religion in sociological terms. The main problem, as Riesebrodt articulated it in his response to the Asadians especially, remained the fixation on discourse. The relentless emphasis on the genealogical analysis of terms had undermined any attempt to undertake transhistorical and cross-cultural comparisons and explanations. The historicizing discursive criticism, taken to its extreme, moreover, ended in the absurd claim that a universal definition of religion could never reflect any shared meaning or reality beyond the particularities of its originating context and particular genealogical development. Yet, as Riesebrodt argued, any abstract term or category we might invoke to delimit given social forms and practices—such as “economy,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and “power”—inevitably betrayed specific historical origins. We persisted in using these terms anyway to make sense of social processes and structures. Riesebrodt agreed that we certainly needed to become aware of the potential limiting biases that origins imparted to concepts. However, we could not avoid the development and deployment of definitions and categories if we wished to say anything about the social world. Even critical approaches persisted in using categories such as “religion,” all the while refusing to define them. Finally, as Riesebrodt pointed out, meaning could exceed discourse. Even when a given society, culture, or group lacked a term that easily translated as “religion,” for example, it nevertheless could recognize another group's act of prostration or chant as like its own actions of performing puja or lighting a candle before a saint. In other words, a recognition of a shared universe of meaningful action could be obtained even in the absence of a common vocabulary. Sociologically, then, we needed a way to interpret the existence of practices that exhibited a mutual, underlying meaning across time and place. Responding to this need, Riesebrodt developed a new theory of religion, at the core of which he centered a precisely articulated universal definition of religion. This definition cast religion as a system of interventive practices predicated on the premise that superhuman forces existed, that these forces could powerfully affect the human world, and that humans could communicate with these forces to prevent, lessen, or overcome overwhelming crises in the body, nature, and society. Discursive and behavior-regulating practices also took form as elaborations of the main interventive systems. Riesebrodt demonstrated how this practice-based theory could apply trans-historically and transculturally through case studies drawn from diverse cultures and time periods. One positive consequence of the theory was the clarity it brought to current debates about the persistence of religion within secularized and disenchanted societies. Secularization and disenchantment, Riesebrodt argued, had generated new experiences of dislocation and crisis to which religions, in recalibrated, revised, and resurgent forms, could speak.3 Oddly, McCutcheon does not cite Riesebrodt in his revised edition of Critics Not Caretakers. This absence highlights McCutcheon's seeming lack of interest in substantive approaches that define religion in terms of what it is and not simply, in functionalist terms, of what it does (for social cohesion, power justification, political “resistance,” and so forth). In the end, for McCutcheon, the only religious studies scholarship that counts is that which occurs in the critical mode. But if we want to understand and explain what religion is as a system of practices that manifests across cultures and time periods, then we must go beyond the critique of ideology. Religion can certainly mask the operations of power. But the reduction to economic, class, gender, political, and other exogenous factors fails to account for how religious practices, premised on a belief in the existence of superhuman forces, generate distinct, subjective interests in salvation (in the sense of a desire to overcome overwhelming crises defying routine responses). This subjective interest requires theorizing and empirical analysis for how it shapes distinct institutions and social actions. These concerns about theorizing aside, the second edition of Critics Not Caretakers and the rest of McCutcheon's writings provide readers with useful texts with which to think. McCutcheon pushes us to clarify what we mean when we invoke “religion.” He also forces us to confront unacknowledged biases for and against different kinds of religion. We still need to listen to him on these matters. The desire today, for example, to privilege the subaltern or to advocate for pluralism and acceptance of difference seems admirable enough in a deeply polarized world in which minority communities and immigrants have increasingly contended with vicious scapegoating and violent repression. But we need to remain sensitive to how we are entering into the fray. On what basis do we determine, for example, that a certain “liberal” version of Islam is a truer expression of the tradition than “radical” Salafism, such as expressed in the Islamic State movement? To take another provocative example, are Jewish settlers in the Palestinian West Bank any less authentic representatives of Judaism than anti-Zionist synagogue communities in the United States? To be sure, though McCutcheon claims otherwise, most religious studies scholars at their best avoid value-laden determinations of these sorts in their professional writings, even if a desire to learn from and amplify the experiences of marginalized groups or explain and map the consequences of violent ones motivates their concern. Most scholars, too, regardless of their underlying motivations, adhere to the basic requirements of argument, evidence, and critical contextualization (of oneself and of one's object of study). We might not actually need McCutcheon's medicine to cure any sort of lingering Eliadean ailment. But we do need to remain alive to the problems of the past and the ways in which they still can affect us unwittingly in the present. The second edition of Critics Not Caretakers goads us to do so. We would do well to keep a copy of it on our bookshelves as we continue to think critically about our field

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