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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." * The Politics of Terms4/19/2005 23:45:13These days the big term is fundamentalism. The worst thing you can be, seemingly, is one. First used as a term of self-understanding among certain early 20th century evangelical Christians, it has since been epanded to include religious militants the world over. Nevertheless, it has been persuasively argued that the entire term is utterly misleading and has become solely exclusionary and polemical. I think mainly of Jay Harris' excellent article, "Fundamentalism: Objections from a Modern Jewish Historian," which leaves us with no essential distinction between so-called fundamentalists and the conventionally and historicall orthodox, aside from the people their movements happen to threaten. Those who study religious phenomona are plagued by their terms. Religion itself is the primary one, a word taken from conventional discourse and converted confusingly into a technical term. All the greats of religious studies have their definition for it. But to this point I have been persuaded by futility that the word indeed can have no objective meaning because it is not the theorists' to give it one. Religion, and fundamentalism with it, are polemical words above all. To understand the more plausible meanings of a word, we can look at the ramifications of its use. What is the political difference between being a religion and not being one? In the United States, to be a religion is to be subject to certain elements of the tax code and certain conventions of behavior that might not apply to a philosophical club or a citizen's organization. The term may then be defined in terms of the purposes of the relevant laws and no other. There is also the problem of Chinese "religions," which scholars cannot agree whether to call philosophy or religion. Again, the implications of both are practical, in the main. If Confucianism is a religion, it is protected on many fronts from direct philosophical inquiry but also likely to be dismissed as either heresy or superstition. It also then becomes a candidate for mystical appreciation. If it is philosophy, it is open to the merciless attack of bored modern philosophy, protected from the anti-religionists, and less prone to benefit or suffer from mystical rereadings. It should be noted that in this case, the problem really only comes about by way of the Western outsider looking in. In any theoretical construct that seeks to apply itself to human phenomena, there will always seem to be exceptions, and exceptions are deeply debilitating. "I know it when I see it" is, I think, actually the most useful definition of religion and fundamentalism - not because of the infallibility of the observer, but because of the deeply subjective implications that both accompany and undermine such an approach. The treatment that Bruce Lincoln gives in the first chapter of Holy Terrors may be on the right track; rather than creating a static definition he suggests several characteristics that may be more or less present in different circumstances. His model, at least, allows for the vast ranges of emphasis that characterize the interpretation of religions. Ultimately, though, I suspect that such terms must be dropped from the technical language. They should be replaced by beautiful words that are more private to the discourse, sheltered somewhat from politicization. Ones that reflect the relativity of the whole affair, isolating carefully both the problems of traditions' autonomy while reserving the possibility of productive comparison. Within such a discourse, the terms we have considered have tremendous potential as subjects (by their role in popular usage) rather than tools of the discourse. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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