Lecture: Does Religion Exist?

What is religion?

At first glance, the answer is obvious. A temple, prayer, a sacred text, a pilgrimage, fasting — we easily recognize religion in almost any culture. But the moment we ask what exactly unites Buddhist meditation, Jewish law, a shamanic ritual, ancestor worship in China, and a Sunday service of Protestants or Orthodox Christians, that apparent obviousness begins to break down.

This is why, over more than a century and a half of religious studies, no single definition of religion has emerged that is universally accepted. Moreover, an increasing number of researchers are concluding that the problem does not lie in the lack of a successful definition. Perhaps "religion" as a universal phenomenon never existed at all. Perhaps this concept is a product of the modern European academy, formed in a specific historical context and spread across the world alongside colonial empires.

At the lecture, we will trace the history of this concept — from antiquity to modernity. We will discuss how religio in Cicero and Lactantius, the Renaissance idea of prisca religio, and the Reformation-born notion of a multiplicity of "religions" gradually shaped the subject matter of modern religious studies. We will also discuss why, at the end of the 20th century, this subject found itself at the center of an acute methodological crisis that called the very existence of the discipline into question.

We will talk about:

• classical definitions of religion in the works of Max Müller, Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and Clifford Geertz, as well as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who was one of the first to question the very concept of "religion";

• critical religious studies by Talal Asad, Jonathan Z. Smith, David Chidester, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Brent Nongbri, which propose studying not so much religion itself as the history of the emergence and functioning of the category;

• the colonial history of the category of "religion" and why recognizing or failing to recognize a particular tradition as a "religion" has always been an instrument of power;

• responses to the critique of critical religious studies in the works of Kevin Schilbrack and Robert Orsi, who demonstrate that the historical constructedness of a concept does not mean it is meaningless.

Separately, we will discuss why this debate is not purely academic. After all, the answer to the question "Does religion exist?" determines not only how we describe human culture, but also whether religious studies has its own subject of research and whether it can exist as an independent academic discipline.

Venue: Offline at the "Plato's Cave" space and Online via Zoom.

Note: If you want to receive only the recording, register via "online participation." After registration, you will be redirected to a Telegram group chat where all necessary information will be posted.

Lecturer: Vitaliy Shchepanskyi — Candidate of Philosophical Sciences (PhD), religious scholar, founder of the Telegram channel "Chosen by Spirits" ("Обранці духів").