The will to religion: Obligatory religious citizenship

This article takes up the problematic of the ‘new normal’ and its necessary twin, the ‘will to religion’. The notion of the ‘new normal’ describes the shift to the persistent presence, indeed requirement, for religious assessment in all manner of public and institutional life. The idea of the will t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Critical research on religion
Main Author: Beaman, Lori G. 1963- (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage [2013]
In: Critical research on religion
Further subjects:B will to religion
B religious identities
B new normal
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Description
Summary:This article takes up the problematic of the ‘new normal’ and its necessary twin, the ‘will to religion’. The notion of the ‘new normal’ describes the shift to the persistent presence, indeed requirement, for religious assessment in all manner of public and institutional life. The idea of the will to religion reflects a broadly Foucauldian perspective on the care of the self and the requirement to confess—in this instance to confess one’s belonging to a religious category. The article calls for a robust attention to the discursive construction of a normal in which we are all religious, and to which values are constituted as ‘universal’ or that we owe our moral and intellectual condition to religion. The article points to four consequences of this shift to a ‘new normal’ in which we are all religious, including the essentialization of religious identities, the overemphasis on religion, the infiltration of particular measures of religiosity, and the spread of religious freedom protectionism.
ISSN:2050-3040
Contains:Enthalten in: Critical research on religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/2050303213490040