Thursday, January 14, 2016

"Welcome Back, This is Not a Spiritual Shopping Store"

By Tenzan Eaghll



A simple point that I like to make on the first day of any Religious Studies course is the following: this is not a "spiritual shopping store." I make this point by stressing what we are not doing in the course: we are not searching for the truth about religion.

When some students first think about taking a class on religion they often do so under the assumption that Religious Studies will help them navigate between the different religions of the world, and thereby make wise spiritual choices in their personal lives. These students tend to think of Religious Studies as an aid to help them choose the best religion ("Buddhism vs. Islam, Yah!") or as an aid to overcome religious institutions all together and be an informed spiritual agnostic ("I took a class on religion once and saw that it is all made up, so now I am spiritual but not religious"). This popular approach to the subject is what leads students to think of the Religious Studies classroom as a "spiritual shopping store"—a way of learning the truth about religion, or life, for that matter. They enroll in a religion class to read books on mysticism because they think that is what real religion looks like ("OMG, Saint Francis of Assisi was the real deal, everything else is just hypocrisy"). Or, to study Jainism because they think the idea of ahimsa is the only truth that can save our confused world ("non-violence is the only answer").

To underline the fact that this "spiritual shopping store" approach is not what we are doing in class, I like to show the following clip from Woody Allen's 1984 movie, Hannah and Her Sisters. Now, I love Allen and I love this movie, but it is a perfect example of how not to approach Religious Studies:

 

I use this clip to introduce students to the a priori assumptions they may have about religion, as it provides a perfect example of  what Timothy Fitzgerald calls The Ideology of Religious Studies.  If you watch the clip closely, you will notice that Allen imagines religion to be a private space of belief, a sanctuary of meaning and value in a desolate secular world.  In the clip he peruses different religions as if they were objects in a spiritual market place of divine meaning.  Of course, this is a very modern understanding of religion and it is quite common in popular culture, so I am not faulting Allen for presenting religion in this manner, but it is an approach that doesn’t help us understand the discursive role religion plays in our modern world. What is ignored in this shopping store approach to religion is all the political, historical, and cultural elements that make this private interpretation of religion possible in the first place. 

In contrast to this "spiritual shopping store" approach to Religious Studies, I stress that we are going to analyze all the social elements that make viewing religion possible. Echoing Slavoj Žižek in The Perverts Guide to Cinema,  I tell them to become religion perverts: I want them to peer behind  the surface image of religion that is presented in textbooks and popular culture and look closely at how discourse on religion is presented. We are not analyzing religion in order to a attain a true description of the world, but in an attempt to view how the very concept of religion functions. This reverses the shopping store approach to Religious Studies by placing students on the margins of religious discourse, so to speak, as critics. Contrary to the above clip from Hannah and Her Sisters, the students are not to approach religion as confused practitioners searching for the secret key to the universe, but as spectators viewing a series of images that are defined as religious. How does religion function in the market place of cultural meaning? What kind of work does it do for people like Allen who have a particular type of world they want to sustain, or understand? As Zizek suggests in relation to filmic reality, the goal of critical analysis is not to generate some kind of "fake fast food religious experience" by getting beyond illusion and touching the real, but by peering inside the construction of illusion itself, observing its production and moving parts.

So, welcome back, but be forewarned, this class is not a "spiritual shopping store"... it is a sustained lesson in the pervert art of critical analysis. 

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