The Antitheses of Religion: Marx, Materialism, and the Making of American Religious Studies
“The Antitheses of Religion: Marx, Materialism, and the Making of American Religious Studies” critically examines the category of materiality in the study of religion through a new interpretation of the field’s formation in the twentieth-century United States. Combining historical and philosophical...
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| Sprache: | Englisch |
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Chicago
University of Chicago
2024
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| In: | Jahr: 2024 |
| weitere Schlagwörter: | B
Material Religion
B Nationalism B Anti-communism B American Protestantism B Fetishism B Jewish Question B Marxism B Materialism B History of the Study of Religion B Cold War B Materiality B Hochschulschrift B Marx B theory and method |
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| 520 | |a “The Antitheses of Religion: Marx, Materialism, and the Making of American Religious Studies” critically examines the category of materiality in the study of religion through a new interpretation of the field’s formation in the twentieth-century United States. Combining historical and philosophical approaches, I seek to understand why we conceptualize materiality in the ways that we do, how our concepts have been shaped by the field’s peculiar American history, and what alternative perspectives that history has foreclosed. The historical argument of the dissertation focuses on the period between World War I and the early 1960s. In these decades, I argue, a culturally potent discourse of “anti-materialism” facilitated the successful entry of religious studies into US colleges and universities. Stitching together intellectual critiques of scientism, religious anxieties over secularism, and opposition to left-wing radicalism, anti-materialism provided religious studies’ proponents with an indispensable rhetorical idiom through which to argue, successfully, that academic instruction in religion was necessary to combat the corrosive effects of cultural secularization and shore up the spiritual foundations of American civic life. This process of disciplinary formation had enduring effects on religious studies. Most notably, it encoded within the field a contextually specific antipathy to methods and perspectives associated with “materialism”—an antipathy insistently expressed in the dichotomous terms of Cold War spiritual conflict. In light of this history, I take up one theoretical avenue foreclosed by religious studies’ Cold War origins, namely, a long-overdue encounter between religious studies and the Marxist theoretical tradition. Through an extended reading of the Marxian corpus, I adumbrate a materialist approach designed to address the contradictions that confront the study of material religion today. The dissertation is divided into two parts, each corresponding, respectively, to the historical and constructive dimensions of the project. Chapter 1 examines the emergence of the movement for an academic study of religion in the decade following World War I, taking the Natural Council on Religion in Higher Education as a privileged lens through which to understand the development of the academic study of religion and the role of anti-materialist discourse in that process. Chapter 2 follows this history into the period of the Cold War. Fortified by a friendly cultural climate, new sources of funding, and a flourishing educational ecosystem, religion scholars and their allies oversaw the creation in this period of a vast disciplinary infrastructure on the presumption that education in religion would re-sacralize, and therefore strengthen American democratic ideals. Chapter 3 clarifies the consequences of this history for the contemporary field. Here I turn my focus to the surprising resurgence of interest in the concept of the fetish among religion scholars, taking the revived discourse on fetishism as a distillation of the successes and enduring challenges confronting religious studies “material turn.” Chapters 4 and 5 take up Karl Marx as a theoretical interlocutor for the study of religion. Chapter 4 examines Marx’s fitful attempts to articulate a critical materialist position in the mid-1840s, focusing on his repeated use of figures of Jews and Judaism as the rhetorical levers facilitating his break with contemporaneous forms of criticism and reorientation toward a nascent materialism. Chapter 5 turns its attention to Capital and its preparatory manuscripts, locating in the latter a trenchant self-critique of the positions discussed in Chapter 4 and a new understanding of materialism as a critical strategy concerned above all else with the genesis and reification of social form. The conclusion brings this materialism to bear on methodological questions in the contemporary field. | ||
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