Expanding ‘religion’

A particularly strong version of the first approach – broadening the scope of philosophy of religion's subject matter – is laid out in Wesley Wildman's Reference Wildman2010 book, Religious Philosophy as Multidisciplinary Comparative Inquiry: Envisioning a Future for the Philosophy of Religion. Partly a critique of what he calls ‘traditional philosophy of religion’ and partly a manifesto for an alternative, Wildman's book makes a case for what he calls ‘religious philosophy’, a term chosen deliberately to establish a distinction from what commonly trades under the name ‘philosophy of religion’. ‘I shall call this multifaceted venture “religious philosophy” in parallel with the phrase “religious studies” – neither is a religious venture as such, but both take religion to be the object of study’ (Wildman (Reference Wildman2010), xiii–xiv). Religious philosophy, on Wildman's account, is not a discipline but rather a container for a variety of multidisciplinary comparative inquiries (ibid., lx). Taking its bearings from religious studies, whose goals and practices it shares, and to which it makes unique contributions, religious philosophy is a secular project, consistent with the norms of academic inquiry of the modern university. The adjective ‘religious’ characterizes its subject matter, not its methods. Religious philosophy, as Wildman conceives it, shares with (the rest of) religious studies the goal of understanding ‘religion as such – not merely what any one given discipline can comprehend of religion, but religion as a whole, in all its intricate variations and manifestations’ (ibid., 14). By approaching religion in all its variety from a standpoint agnostic with respect to the various claims under examination, religious philosophy aspires to shift philosophy of religion onto a critical, secular footing.

There is much to be said in favour of broadening the scope of philosophy of religion, whatever term we choose to describe the field so reconceived. There are, however, worries too. One of these concerns the idea that what makes the field a field is, inter alia, a shared subject matter – namely, religion – investigated in its complexity by multiple disciplines. That religion can play this unifying role is an assumption that has been challenged, ironically, by religious studies itself, which, over the past decade or two, has taken a reflexive turn, towards a critical examination of its own categories, including, most importantly, the category of religion.

The critique of ‘religion’

‘Religion’ has been shown to be a comparatively recent innovation. More precisely: what ‘religion’ means today is not what the term (or its analogues) used to mean. On the contemporary popular understanding, ‘religion’ names a sphere of individual and/or social life analytically distinguishable from so-called secular domains, such as the state and the market. A matter fundamentally of belief, religion is properly, if not always actually, private. Thus conceived, religion is an anthropological universal – a dimension of personhood and an ingredient in every ‘great civilization’ – but it takes diverse forms, the most significant of which are the ‘world religions’ – namely the ‘Eastern’ or ‘Wisdom’ traditions of Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Shinto, on the one hand, and the ‘Western’ or ‘Prophetic’ traditions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Zoroastrianism, on the other.

Scholars disagree on precisely when the term acquired its contemporary meaning, which is unsurprising given that the foregoing composite sketch lies at the intersection of a number of distinct genealogical trajectories. Tomoko Masuzawa (Reference Masuzawa2005) has argued that the concept of ‘world religions’ – which has expanded over time to comprise some eleven or so ‘great traditions’ – is an invention of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By contrast, the idea that religion is separable from politics and the state developed in the early modern period, and the emphasis on belief – with its corresponding disdain of ritual and material culture – bears the marks of a long-standing Reformed polemic against Catholicism.

The novelty of the modern understanding can be seen in contrast with earlier uses of the term. In antiquity, the Latin term religio functioned differently, in reference to a broad range of duties that included but were not limited to cultic rights (Dubuisson (Reference Dubuisson and Sayers2003), 15). Augustine would later use the term to mean worship. As William Cavanaugh points out, in De Vera Religione (‘On True Religion’), ‘Augustine's subject is not “Christianity” as a – or the – true religion alongside other religions understood as systematic sets of propositions and rites’ (Cavanaugh (Reference Cavanaugh2009), 63). For Augustine, ‘true religion’ was not a body of doctrine or a privileged in-group but properly directed worship. The term ‘religion’ was used infrequently in the middle ages and never in the sociological sense described above (ibid., 64). As recently as the early modern period, it remained the European convention to speak of peoples (‘Jews’, ‘Mohammedans’, ‘Christians’) rather than of religions (‘Judaism’, ‘Islam’, ‘Christianity’) (Masuzawa (Reference Masuzawa2005), 61).

The transformations in practice that gave rise to these transformations in discourse are manifold – the Protestant Reformation, the rise of nation-states, European colonial encounters with otherness – but the emerging discourse of religion enabled the construction in turn of new social realities. Commenting on this history, the anthropologist Talal Asad famously concludes that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion, not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’ (Asad (Reference Asad1993), 29). Religion, on this view, is not a perennial, universal phenomenon that contemporary categories serve to single out and name; rather, it is itself a distinctively modern, Western formation, only problematically read into contexts to which these categories are foreign.

An artefact of Western modernity, religion came, ironically, to be associated above all with the East (as characterizing that which was not Europe) and with the past (as characterizing what was not modern). Paradoxically, those lacking the category were assumed to be the most religious, so completely immersed in religion as to lack the secular frame of reference necessary to wrestle it into view as such. If the citizens of ‘advanced’, differentiated, secular societies in Europe and North America had religions, people in other parts of the world were said to be had by them, their subjectivities and social institutions awaiting emancipation from its thrall (cf. Brown (Reference Brown, de Vries and Sullivan2006), 299). Orientalist discourses about religion thus helped to rationalize and justify the colonial projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, framing conquest as liberation. To qualify as modern, a society needed to circumscribe and contain religion, disentangling it from markets and political institutions and rendering it a repository of apolitical wisdom and private value, on which newly autonomized subjects – aspiring to inhabit a realm of freedom and rationality – could electively draw for inspiration, guidance, and ethical orientation. Distance from this ideal was a measure of heteronomy, despotism, and cultural backwardness. Through these encounters, the concept of religion found its way into novel cultural contexts, remaking the social world.

To appreciate the genealogy of the category of ‘religion’ is not necessarily to deny that religion sans quotation marks is ‘real’, or that social phenomena exist to which this language can be applied. Here an analogy with critical race theory might be helpful. Racial categories, like religious ones, are culturally constructed, contextual, and contingent, but race is real in the sense that the employment of these categories has real effects in the world. Racial categories shape the world in distinctive and consequential ways. To attempt to counter (certain of) these effects simply by rejecting the language of race would in many cases only re-entrench prevailing racialized dynamics of power. Similarly, it can be observed that the category of ‘religion’, with which the category of race has been co-constituted and with which it shares important features, has taken on a life of its own. It is entrenched not only in scholarship, but also in law, public discourse, and the broader social imaginary and has been appropriated well beyond the contexts of its origins, remaking other cultures and in turn being remade through this contact. The reality of religion, like that of race, is revealed in the lives to which this discourse belongs, and to which it is applied: the discursive practices anchor the reality. As a result, however, religion and race are inherently contestable; their reality does not prevent the revision of the practices to which discourse about them belongs.

Genealogy is not simply history of ideas. It is a philosophical method. Though many of its ablest practitioners – Masuzawa and Asad included – like to insist that they are doing descriptive rather than normative scholarship, genealogy's effect is to blur this very distinction. Its function is to pose the past in the form of a question for the future. The point is not that a given concept has a history; every concept does, and to subject a concept to genealogical analysis is not necessarily to criticize or reject it, as though we were discontent with anything less than Platonic forms. Rather, genealogy raises the question of how to confront this history in specific instances, of what to do with an inheritance. By shedding light on the regimes of power to which knowledge belongs, genealogy also prompts reflection on the role our own work as scholars plays in reproducing these regimes and/or putting them in question. Genealogy is an exercise in taking responsibility.

These questions of responsibility arise in connection with philosophy of religion itself. New cross-cultural approaches to the field seek to move it beyond the preoccupations of Christian theology (themselves too often ahistorically conceived) and the abstractions of ‘classical theism’, towards an appreciation of a broader, more capacious range of religious phenomena. But if the concept of religion is itself the product of extrapolation from modern, Western, Christian understandings, disseminated through colonial encounter, does the new philosophy of religion – in its ambition to decentre Christian theology and do justice to the whole range of religion – simply reproduce the deficiencies of the old, under the guise of a universalizing, albeit culturally and historically particular, category? And does the effort to conform to the secular canons of the modern university – to approach religion as it were from ‘outside’, on the model of religious studies – reinscribe the boundaries of ‘religion’ as a discrete (and philosophically puzzling) phenomenon? To put it the other way around: does the identification of specific practices and beliefs as religious – and so as suitable topics for philosophers of religion – presuppose and thus leave unexamined a distinctive regime of knowledge – a background of presumed self-evidence – which ought itself to be thematized and put in question?

Thematizing the secular

The critique of the category of religion is sometimes confused with an anti-theological polemic. That this is so is ironic, because it is partly by means of the category of religion that theology – Christian and otherwise – has come to be contained and marginalized. Yet, in the work of scholars such as Russell McCutcheon and Bruce Lincoln, criticism of the category of religion has been pressed into the service of a reductive social-scientific agenda. According to this view, religion is not sui generis; rather, it can be disaggregated into a variety of mundane phenomena – rituals, claims to authority, acts of identification – each of which is susceptible to deflationary explanation (see McCutcheon (Reference McCutcheon1997) ). These phenomena constitute data for academic study but cannot be allowed to shape its methods: they belong to the explanandum, not the explanans. Although I lack the space here to assess this social-scientific approach, I wish simply to point out that it is not entailed by the genealogical analysis described briefly above, which is a critique of the category of religion, not necessarily of the things so categorized, the explanatory power of so-called religious narratives, or the appropriateness of their employment in academic study. The possibility of theology (understood broadly, as a normative discipline or disciplines) does not depend upon the category of religion or the claim that religion is sui generis. To be sure, the critique of ‘religion’ might serve to undercut certain versions of liberal theology or religious pluralism, but it is neither an inherently anti-theological project nor a self-evidently ‘secular’ one. Indeed, there is a lengthy history of theologians criticizing the category of religion for theological reasons. It is thus curious to find certain scholars in religious studies seeking to erase the boundary around religion while reinscribing it methodologically, by insisting upon the secularity of their project and treating their research subjects as ‘data’, rather than as interlocutors. Occasionally writers in this vein will acknowledge the legitimacy in principle of other epistemological frameworks and ways of knowing, while nevertheless insisting that the latter are ‘not scholarship’. Here ‘scholarship’ seems to play a role analogous to that played in German-language academic discourse by Wissenschaft, i.e. the role of establishing a boundary between what belongs in the university and what does not. Yet, it is notoriously difficult to justify this boundary, which is largely the result of shifting historical contingencies, political dynamics, and cultural settlements. As with other claims to neutrality and objectivity, appeals to the scientificity of secular inquiry ought to be greeted with considerable suspicion, as tools of ideological legitimation that function to maintain the epistemic privilege of an in-group.Footnote ¹ The identification of the critique of the category of religion with a deflationary anti-theological agenda has understandably created the impression among some philosophers of religion that it ought to be resisted. However, these two projects are distinct, and the latter – whatever its merits – is not entailed by the former.

I argue that a much more fruitful line of inquiry involves pairing the study of the cultural history of religion with a corresponding philosophical analysis of the larger imaginary within which the term functions, the background against which religion can be identified as an object of interest, anxiety, regulation and academic study.Footnote ² We might call this background the secular, if we are careful to note the ways in which this use of the term – as a name for a particular frame of reference – differs from its use within that frame, where it denotes, inter alia, the non-religious. The secular is not the absence of religion, but – on the contrary – the regime of knowledge within which religion emerges into view as a discrete topos. It is an episteme – a bundle of attitudes, dispositions, affects, and ethical intuitions that structures knowledge. So understood, the secular must be distinguished from the different but related concepts of secularism (an anti-religious ideology) and secularity (a political strategy for the containment and management of religion). These latter concepts are themselves secular, insofar as they presuppose the distinction between religion and not-religion. It is, however, important to appreciate that one need not be a secularist in order to be secular. On the contrary, to advocate on behalf of religion is a characteristically secular endeavour.Footnote ³ ‘Religion’ is a secular category.

The secular is intertwined with and homologous to certain other cultural formations, such as racial whiteness, which function as culturally constructed but naturalized defaults in relation to which ‘difference’ is configured and managed. As Vincent W. Lloyd has recently put the point,

Similar points can be made about, inter alia, maleness relative to gender, and heterosexuality relative to sexuality. Indeed, these hegemonic defaults are co-constituted and mutually reinforcing. It is worth noting in this connection that the secular – like philosophy itself – tends to be associated with rationality and contrasted to religious ‘irrationality’ and affect.

What might it require to get the secular into view as an object of philosophical analysis – to reposition it as a topic of, rather than the unquestioned context for, inquiry? In a provocative article entitled ‘Deprovincializing Philosophy of Religion’, Jacob Holsinger Sherman argues for both the revaluation of non-Western ways of knowing and a contextualizing and relativizing of the secular episteme central to Western scholarship on difference. ‘It is not enough merely to give a charitable ear to a supposedly emic other’, he writes, ‘one must also contextualize, politicize, and historically situate supposedly neutral and universal etic perspectives at the same time’ (Sherman (Reference Sherman2018), 345). Calling attention to the dominance within the Western academy of what he refers to as ‘normative secularity – the active and unabashed privileging of etic perspectives, especially the privileging of naturalist etic perspectives’ (ibid., 356), Sherman advocates moving beyond the naturalizing, historicizing gaze of the secular study of religion towards an appreciation of various emic perspectives – a move which requires acknowledging those outside the secular episteme as conversation partners, not methodologically mute data. He writes:

I am in full agreement with Sherman on the need not simply to expand the range of possibilities over which philosophy of religion extends its gaze, but also to challenge the normativity of the secular gaze itself. To put this another way, it is not simply the ‘religion’ in ‘philosophy of religion’ that needs pluralizing, but also the ‘philosophy’. Indeed, it is worth noting, as Richard King has pointed out, that non-Western thought has historically often been branded ‘religion’ by Western scholars, thus obviating the need for Western philosophers to engage with it as philosophy (King (Reference King1999), 32).Footnote ⁴ Ironically, in expanding the category of religion to include non-Western thought, without also pluralizing philosophy itself, we risk barring these so-called non-Western religious thinkers from the role of philosophical interlocutors. I would like here, however, to suggest some additional nuances to Sherman's characterization of what this endeavour to deprovincialize philosophy of religion by provincializing the secular demands.

First, while the secular episteme certainly aspires to hegemony, it is not clear that it always succeeds, leaving the distinction between the secular West and its non-secular others fuzzier than is sometimes assumed. The secular regime of knowledge is moreover fraught with paradox and tension, bearing within itself the traces of what it aspires to exclude and thus already destabilized from within. Provincializing the secular is not simply a matter of bringing one internally consistent point of view into encounter with others, but of opening it to suppressed possibilities latent in itself. Indeed, these fissures are what allow the encounter with ‘difference’ to amount to something more than a standoff between incommensurable, reified identities.

Second, provincializing the secular is not merely a matter of adding it to our now expanded repertoire of religious topics, alongside other forms of ‘habituated religious or contemplative practice’. Indeed, because the secular is the episteme that allows us to speak of religion as a discrete topic, loosening its grip on philosophy will necessarily have the effect not only of pluralizing our subject matter but also of pluralizing the ways that subject matter is framed. Making the strange familiar and the familiar strange will, in other words, complicate the categories in terms of which we configure difference. It is not by emphasizing religion or broadening its extension, but by attempting to think otherwise, unbeholden to the organizational logic of ‘religion’, that one can begin to challenge the normativity of the secular gaze.

And third, because the secular is, among other things, a mode of temporality, which functions to maintain a certain understanding of the modern – a point to which I shall return shortly – relativizing the secular will problematize the idea that philosophy of religion should aspire to be modern and can vindicate itself through appeal to narratives of progress. Rather than attempting to defend the modernity of philosophy of religion's methods, I would rather put in question the epistemic assumptions and historical periodization that give the objection of anachronism its sting.

Provincializing the secular by historicizing ‘religion’

How might we then go about softening the secular up from within in such a way as to gain critical philosophical purchase on its concepts and grammar? I don't believe there is any single answer to this question, in part because the secular is not one thing but an ensemble of them. What I would like to offer in what follows is a series of interrelated reflections from a (provisional) standpoint that is itself rather secular. This is not a standpoint I have chosen to adopt, or which I can simply renounce through force of will. Rather, I find myself within it. Yet, as I have suggested, the secular is not so consistent and all pervasive as to render hopeless every attempt from within it to think against its grain – to think not simply with it, but about it. Indeed, I shall suggest that the real problem is not the secular per se – if, in fact, certain features of a secular sensibility can be dislodged from the hegemonic position in which they have been ensconcedFootnote ⁵ – but the institutionalization of any particular frame of reference as shielded from reciprocal analysis from the perspective of its anthropological ‘data’.

Here I would like to consider some remarks of Foucault's from his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–1979). In these lectures, Foucault sets out to examine ‘the way in which this practice that consists in governing was conceptualized both within and outside government’ – that is to say, to inquire into how the categories that historians and political theorists bring to their analysis of government emerged out of and function within political practice itself (Foucault (Reference Foucault, Senellart and Burchell2008), 2). For Foucault,

Rather than taking these ‘universals’ as given, as comprising ‘an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices’, Foucault's project invites us to view them as objects of historical analysis (ibid., 2–3). He writes:

We might call Foucault's approach methodological nominalism. It is a topic to which he promises to return later in the lectures but does not. What he does say, however, suggests a starting point in thinking about the secular. If religion is a secular category, and indeed, a defining one, then one strategy for gaining critical distance on the secular might be to ask how history, or, indeed, philosophy of religion, might be written and organized without this concept.Footnote ⁶

It is sometimes asked why the category of religion should be singled out for special critique, given that all categories have histories, and that it is impossible to write history without the use of historical concepts. For example, Asad's claim that a universal definition of religion is impossible, because any such definition is itself the result of historical discursive processes, might be faulted for setting an impossibly high bar: what definition is not the product of history? Similarly, after having canvassed the difficulties with the term ‘religion’, Timothy Fitzgerald suggests that we might turn instead to the concept of ‘culture’, but this suggestion appears not to fully appreciate the problems (much explored in anthropology) with the latter concept (Fitzgerald (Reference Fitzgerald2000), 222ff.). For Foucault, methodological nominalism is a general strategy, applicable to any organizing category, even if it is necessary to rely on some categories while analysing others. Best conceived as a method, rather than a substantive claim, it is premised not on a discontent with general categories per se, but on the recognition of their historical contingency and an interest in the conditions of their production. My interest in applying Foucault's method to the category of religion is strategic: one answer to the objection that all categories have histories, many of them problematic, is that ‘religion’ is central to the secular in a way that other concepts are not. What explains the interest in this particular category is not that it is unlike other categories in having a history, but that it plays a central role in the episteme under examination, the secular.

Is historicism secular?

Though much can be gained by thinking historically about our concepts, there is a philosophical difficulty here, having to do with the fact that historical time – the immanent progression of efficient causes – is itself entangled with the secular. As in the case of ‘religion’, the term ‘secular’ has undergone important transformations of meaning. Whereas today the secular tends to be imagined in spatial terms – as a shared domain of publicity, from which religion is excluded – the word originally referred to the temporal structure of chronology, as distinct from eternity and kairotic time. As this earlier distinction gradually faded, the term ‘secular’ was given new spatial employments, and the homogeneous progression of events within an immanent causal nexus became naturalized as history. In the absence of any larger temporal imaginary or alternative temporal structure with which it could be contrasted, history has come to be viewed as a domain of facticity, the neutral baseline for understanding religion and adjudicating its claims. As Saba Mahmood pointed out, ‘secularity flattens religious incommensurability, forcing religious traditions to confront one another in the uniform space of history, all equally vulnerable to the questioning power of the secular’ (Mahmood (Reference Mahmood2016), 207).Footnote ⁷ But in this very recognition – not only that the secular is historical (belonging to a particular epoch), but also that history is secular (a particular mode of narration) – we are confronted with the paradox and methodological inadequacy of attempting to historicize history itself. Although the secular gaze can be turned back on itself – as in the emerging field of ‘secular studies’ – it can manage in the process of self-critique ironically to re-entrench itself.

The naturalizing of secular history has material consequences. I have argued elsewhere that understandings of time are always implicated in practices and institutions, and that secular time – what Walter Benjamin called ‘homogeneous, empty time’ (Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn1968), 261) – is maintained by, and in turn helps to underwrite, the institutions of the state and the market (Amesbury (Reference Amesbury2018), 603–607). As Reinhart Koselleck has pointed out, the flattening of time allowed the early modern state to establish its authority on the basis of inductive inference and rational prediction and to undercut rival claims to authority grounded in prophecy, apocalypse, and what Charles Taylor calls ‘higher times’ (Taylor (Reference Taylor2007), 54):

The state, in turn, helps to enforce the ‘long-run’ that functions as the horizon for monetarism, the economic policy underlying what is popularly described as ‘neoliberalism’. By regulating the money supply, the state stabilizes these horizons, creating conditions for profit, growth, and economic ‘progress’. Interestingly, this long-run of the market is sometimes described as ‘secular’, as, for example, when Larry Summers (Reference Summers2013) cautioned against ‘secular stagnation’ – the gradual slowing of GDP growth. Here the term is being used in its classical sense, which is temporal.

Within this secular temporal imaginary, religion is positioned as belonging essentially to the past. A modern category, religion is, for modernity, a perennial anachronism. Coming into view only as it is perceived to be receding, it is imagined as most pervasive precisely where it is not identified as such. Masuzawa writes:

Religion – that is to say, its putative historical displacement – belongs to the deep mythology of the secular episteme. It is what makes modernity modern.

Recent efforts to historicize the secular episteme, while well intentioned, have the curious effect of reaffirming this secular temporal imaginary and – indirectly – the practices and institutions on which it depends. Is there a way of decentring and contextualizing secular time that does not consist in attempting to place it within itself? Here we are confronted with the central challenge in the study of the secular – which I shall call the problem of framing. To be made sense of as an object of study and critique in the way that religion is an object within the secular episteme, the secular episteme would need to be framed by something other than itself: it would have to be grasped from the point of view of some outer limit. But because religion and history are both constituent elements of the secular imaginary, neither can provide this outer limit. Moreover, depending on how one understands the relation between the frame and what is framed by it, the search for ever wider frames of reference itself can pose a logical puzzle, setting up a regress of frames of frames. The secular frames religion, but what frames the secular, and what frames that frame, etc.?

Framing: lineal and moebius

The theory of framing proposed in anthropology by Gregory Bateson borrows its imagery from the way a frame on a wall directs the viewer's attention to the artwork within. It presupposes a distinction between outside and inside (Bateson (Reference Bateson1972), 186). This distinction has been fundamental to the self-understanding of the academic study of religion, which typically prides itself on taking the etic perspective of the disinterested ‘outsider’, in this way distinguishing itself from theology of various kinds. It is this ostensibly privileged, supposedly apolitical vantage point of the framer vis-à-vis the subject ‘religion’ that constitutes the secular. As Bruce Lincoln puts the point in the first of his ‘Theses on Method’, ‘The conjunction “of” that joins the two nouns in the disciplinary ethnonym “History of Religions” is not neutral filler. Rather, it announces a proprietary claim and a relation of encompassment: History is the method and Religion the object of study’ (Lincoln (Reference Lincoln2005), 8). The frame here stands above what it frames and dictates the terms in which the latter is to be understood. Indeed, Lincoln concludes that, ‘[w]hen one permits those whom one studies to define the terms in which they will be understood . . .one has ceased to function as historian or scholar’ (ibid., 10).Footnote ⁸

From the perspective of anyone conversant in postcolonial theory or sensitive to the significance of power and positionality, these claims are bound to be worrying, but it is helpful to have them so plainly and unapologetically laid bare.Footnote ⁹ Lincoln suggests that ‘the ideological products and operations of other societies afford invaluable opportunities to the would-be student of ideology’, and that the tough-minded scholar ought not to pull any critical punches owing to ‘the guilty conscience of western imperialism’ (ibid., 10, 9). But it is striking that the method articulated in his theses affords the scholar's research subjects no opportunity to talk back. The framing is entirely one-directional, and what they say is of interest only within the scholar's frame, not relevant to it methodologically.

Somewhat ironically, the privileged perspective claimed by the historian or scholar of religion might also be seen to mirror, in its basic structure, that once claimed by and within theology. Its gaze, like that of the divine, is proprietary and encompassing, and it need not explain itself to those over whom it extends its dominion. In a discussion of Bateson's theory of framing, the anthropologist Don Handelman notes that hierarchical understandings of framing are in fact nothing new:

The problem with the secular, one might say, is not that it decentres theology, but that it usurps its throne, establishing itself as the epistemic centre of the universe. The central conceit of the secular is that it is the frame of frames – the neutral, objective vantage point, the view from nowhere. To the extent that it is precisely this conceit that needs to be challenged, and not the secular perspective qua embodied perspective, it would appear that what is required is not a superior perspective – a more secular form of the secular – but rather a way of decentring and contextualizing the secular that does not pretend to neutrality – a perspective that does not simply interrogate, but allows itself to be interrogated by, what it seeks to understand.

Handelman contrasts lineal framing, which is hierarchical and uni-directional, moving from the meta-level to what it subsumes, with an alternative cognitive topology, which he calls ‘moebius framing’ (ibid., 66). Borrowing its name from the topological figure of a single surface that loops in on itself, subverting the distinction between what is inside and what outside, moebius framing does not require ‘a position of externality or otherness which itself tends toward a clear-cut distinction between inside/outside, self/other’ (ibid.) Understood ‘moebiusly’, the distinction between frame and content is entirely perspectival and in constant oscillation. Although Handelman is interested in framing primarily within ritual and play, I would suggest that his reflections on framing point us towards a useful model for thinking about the unique contribution philosophers of religion might make to the study of religion and of the secular.

By displacing and contextualizing the authority of the secular, the approach I am here recommending opens space for perspectives outside the modern, Western dispensation privileged within contemporary academic philosophy. Rather than attempting to broaden its scope by institutionalizing the frame of normative secularity and admitting a range of ‘religious’ understandings as data awaiting critical analysis, philosophy of religion can move beyond parochialism precisely by allowing these roles to be reversed and placed in motion; i.e., by recognizing that normative secularity is itself a potential datum for philosophical analysis. This article has sought to exemplify an initial movement in that direction – if not a reframing per se, at least a recognition of this possibility, and an offering up to critical examination of the secular perspective from which it begins. To view the secular from an alternative normative perspective is not necessarily to view it from the standpoint of religion: ‘religion’, as I have argued, is a secular category. Rather it is to permit each frame to be examined from the standpoint of others, to recognize that the ‘secular’ perspective is one among many, and that there is no perspective on diversity that does not contribute to it. Frames, on this approach, are conceived of as in constant flux, logically incapable of being frozen into a hierarchical configuration.

Philosophy of religion need not commit itself to either the etic perspective of the secular study of religion or the emic perspective of normative theology (or analogous critical practices in non-theistic traditions). Or rather, it might commit itself to both. Conceived as a sort of moebius loop, philosophy of religion is not a third thing – a wider or higher normative perspective – but a practice of mutual critical encompassment, which comprises movement in both directions. Undertaken cross-culturally, philosophy of religion would find itself engaged not simply in conceptual analysis, but also in analysis of power – i.e. in denaturalizing otherwise hegemonic frames, secular and otherwise. So conceived, philosophy offers no vantage point above encounter. Rather, it is a practice of reciprocal framing of frames – a form of disciplined inquiry that continually subverts attempts at establishing epistemological hierarchies, including those of both Christian theism and normative secularity.