Critical Research on Religion

Critics of climate collapse and colonization in the Americas rightly identify the origin of these twin crises in early modern political theologies. They seek to combat these crises with new political theologies of nature that pay greater reverence to “native” peoples’ ecological knowledge. But in doing so, these critics subtly, perhaps unwittingly, recall elements of the colonial power they criticize. I explain why this is the case, examining Bartolomé de Las Casas’s use of naturales in his critiques of Spanish Conquest, and Thomas Harriot’s use of naturall inhabitants in his writing on English colonization to describe “native” Americans. Both authors aimed to promote politico-theological reverence for “native” peoples and their relationships with “nature.” This set into motion a productive form of power operating in modern political theologies. This power works by legitimizing the European-Christian presence in the Americas through their ability to recognize, respect, and protect “native” relationships with “nature.”

Many non-Indigenous people assume that secularism—the belief that religion and politics are and should be different spheres of life—is foreign to Native American experience. This partly explains why the topic of Native conversions in early New England has always been so controversial, since conversion implies the differentiation of religion from politics. Be that as it may, history shows that Indigenous peoples are well acquainted with secularism and have been debating it within their communities for centuries. This essay demonstrates proof of concept for a history of Indigenous secularism via a case study of Samson Occom, whose vision of Indigenous self-determination was informed by secularist ideas about sovereignty and conversion. It also offers a critique of scholarly romanticizations of Indigenous peoples' primordially “holistic” a-secularism. This romanticization is the product of a secular-colonial ideology which presupposes the otherness of Indigenous peoples when it comes to differentiating between religion and politics.

This article focuses on the career of the Jesuit priest, Constantino Bayle, as a historian of Spanish Catholic missions and promoter of state-sponsored arrangements that institutionalized nationalist religious historiography. He encoded religious nationalism and racist categories in academic discourse and terminology, elevating in this way racist assumptions and renewed imperialist aspirations to the level of official historiography. The article traces Bayle’s early career as an Americanista at the Spanish Catholic periodical, Razón y Fe. Bayle was an ardent supporter of Francisco Franco’s military uprising of 1936. He was an apologist for Falange Española who defended its Catholic character. Alongside other Jesuits, he was responsible for forging a Spanish school of missiology that was predicated upon the tenets of Spanish national Catholicism and that was meant to rival analogous Protestant and Roman Catholic historiographic projects. Central to this culturalist endeavor were the notions of Hispanidad and Raza Hispanica.

Catholic priests who sexually abused minors were transferred to other parishes without disclosing the actual reason for their transfer. Based on reports from Ireland, Germany, and the USA, and relying on Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus, this article demonstrates that first, the practices of denying and withholding information even to fellow priests are consequences of the repression of sexuality within the Catholic Church. The Church has not provided a legitimate language for priests to be able to engage openly about sexuality. Sexual repression as a field structure is incorporated into the priests’ habitus, resulting in self-censorship when it comes to articulating the issue of sexual abuse. Secondly, the article accounts for the change within the Catholic field and the priest’s habitus, which has resulted in the facility to verbally express sexual matters in order that the undisclosed practice of transferring abusive priests finally stopped.

This article interprets critiques of secularity and the related concept of history as progress in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Judith Butler. At the same time, it defends their approach against the criticism voiced by Gregor McLennan. It shows that the postsecular conception of the politics of both authors is not just an attempt to open public space to a wider range of religious and cultural voices. Rather, it is a critique of the way in which political secularism and the ideology of progress are used by the modern state to legitimize the exercise of its own power. Butler and Chakrabarty's postsecular policy is thus based primarily on coalition building against these legitimization frameworks, which opens up the possibility of forming new postsecular political subjects. It illustrates the theoretical approach of both authors with an example of the church sanctuary movement in Germany.

This piece is a response to Jean-Pierre Reed’s review of Bringing Back the Social into the Sociology of Religion published in Critical Research on Religion. Aside from his appreciation for the contributions of this volume, Jean-Pierre Reed’s critique concentrates on three fundamental issues in relation to the agenda for a critical sociology of religion we advance: scientificism, interdisciplinarity, and politics. This response focuses on scientificism and politics in particular, since they are intimately related and at the core of this book’s evaluation of the subfield.