Ted Vial

Religion is a racialized category, even when race is not explicitly mentioned. In Modern Religion, Modern Race Theodore Vial argues that because the categories of religion and race are rooted in the post-Enlightenment project of reimagining what it means to be human, we cannot simply will ourselves to stop using them. Only by acknowledging that religion is already racialized can we begin to understand how the two concepts are intertwined and how they operate in our modern world.It has become common to argue that the category religion is not universal, or even very old, but is a product of Europe's Enlightenment modernization. Equally common is the argument that religion is not an innocent category of analysis, but is implicated in colonial regimes of control and as such plays a role in Europe's process of identity construction of itself and of non-European

Chapter 4 shows why we must extend our genealogies of religion and race past the Enlightenment by comparing Johann Gottfried Herder and Schleiermacher on language and on the formation of groups. Both men are seminal figures in the linguistic turn in the humanities. Both argue that we think by applying concepts, but that these concepts are not innate but linguistic. Both follow the logic of this insight to its conclusion—people who have different mother tongues think and experience differently. Religious and national groups are formed by culture and language. Though Herder explicitly rejects Kant’s theories of race, this cultural turn ironically supplies a link missing from Kant’s race theories. Kant cannot say why individuals who belong to certain groups share the mental and moral characteristics of those groups. Herder and Schleiermacher open the possibility that this link is cultural and linguistic rather than biological.

Friedrich Schleiermacher is commonly taken as the founder of a bad trajectory in the study of religion—bad because it imports Protestant theological assumptions into comparative religions, and because it makes religion internal, private, and ineffable. Schleiermacher is taken to remove religion from the intersections of social, historical, and linguistic factors. At the root of this criticism is the argument that Schleiermacher tries to do an end run around the epistemological limits set by Kant. This chapter argues that this is not the best reading of Schleiermacher. Comparing Schleiermacher and Kant on epistemology, and reading several key terms in Schleiermacher’s theory of religion with close attention to his own texts, shows that Schleiermacher holds religion to be essentially historical, social, and linguistic.

Schleiermacher offers an appealing account of religion in which it is not coercive but expressive, does not come into conflict with modern politics or science, and forms the most important and fulfilling part of each person’s identity. But when we look at Schleiermacher’s own efforts at comparative religion with this category at its base, troubles arise. At the same time that Schleiermacher was writing his famous Speeches on Religion he was writing a historical account of the British settlement of Australia, and engaging in an exchange of public letters about the emancipation of Jews in Prussia. If religion is what Schleiermacher says it is, these religions do not measure up very well. Religions in societies that do not foster expressive communication and religions in which expressive communication have ossified into empty ritual rank much lower than Prussian Protestantism in Schleiermacher’s hierarchical taxonomy of religions.

We take for granted a theory of human nature that Charles Taylor has called “expressivism.” Expressivism shows how individuals are shaped by their communities and how individuals shape their communities. Expressivism ties individual and group identity together. It lies at the core of our modern ideas of religion and race because it shows why these groups are central to our identity, and why membership in religious and racial groups shapes the ways we think and act. Though Herder attacks Kant’s race theories, and Schleiermacher is an early and robust pluralist, both are key figures in the construction of the Western anthropology of expressivism that makes modern race-thinking possible and ties race to religious groups.

Friedrich Max Müller is often cited as the founder of a good trajectory in the history of the study of religion—good because it is scientific, nontheological, and comparative. This chapter’s comparison of Schleiermacher and Müller accomplishes four important things: it shows that the category of religion has shifted radically over time; it shows that if we stop our genealogies in the Enlightenment, as most scholars do, we miss the links between language, social group, and religious identity in the modern world; it shows that Müller violates Kant’s epistemology in ways Schleiermacher does not; it shows that linguists influenced by Müller create hierarchical taxonomies of language groups—based on grammatical structure, some languages are more expressive and creative than others. Though Müller rejects attempts to use linguistics in racial classification, these linguistic hierarchies map exactly onto Kant’s hierarchy of races.

The racist language of some of the founders of the discipline of religious studies is held in disdain. But we have inherited from them the structure of the categories of race and religion, and we have inherited from them the assumption that to make sense of the world we must see history as having a teleology. We theorize difference by placing groups on a trajectory of progress toward history’s goals. This goal is always some version of noncoercive free expressivism. With examples from Islam, Africa, and from The Norton Anthology of World Religions, the chapter shows that the placement of different groups as more or less developed, more or less modern, maps precisely onto the racial hierarchies of our eighteenth- and nineteenth-century founders. Though the chapter offers some examples of people fighting against this, it is apparently almost impossible to stop deploying religion as a racialized and hierarchical category.

Kant has been credited with “inventing” the concept of race. This chapter enters into the debates about whether or not Kant’s views on race are separable from his critical philosophy. It argues that Kant’s racial theories are tied to his philosophy, but in ways that have not been accurately or adequately described in the secondary literature. Race, for Kant, is a privileged example of the need for teleology in order to do science and history. The mass of data must be organized under a framework of progress toward some historical endpoint. While Kant’s race theories are now discredited, the modern world continues to rest on this teleological assumption, and so continues to make hierarchical distinctions in ways that closely resemble Kant’s.

By looking at recent examples in the news, examples from the academic study of religion, and personal examples, the introduction makes the case that religion and race are not going away in the contemporary world. They are intractable because they are part of the conceptual architecture of modernity. We must extend extant genealogies of religion and race past the Enlightenment. It is the generation following the Enlightenment, and in particular a group of post-Kantian German thinkers, who gave final shape to the modern world. It is necessary to look at these thinkers to gain a full understanding of how religion and race operate, and their intractability, in the present world.