How did “religion” and the “state” come to be imagined as separate domains possessing problematic relations? This is the question that motivates Timothy Fitzgerald's second book, continuing the quest he began with The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) to deconstruct religion and its monitoring disciplinary enclave, religious studies. In order to enjoy his spin, one must agree that scholars of religion have assumed that the religious is such a distinct endeavor, that we have made religion an embedded isolate, presumed “into common sense” as something simultaneously uncritical, rational, nonreligious, natural, neutral, and secular (9, 26). If you subscribe to this premise, with the invention of a discourse of “encompassing Religion,” then you may join Fitzgerald on his pursuit of different terminology, for words with “relatively stable meanings” that could “provide at least a temporary ground from which to view our own more ideologically weighted discourses” (18, 25). One nomination is referred to in his title. “Unlike the religion-secular ideology of modern nation-states,” Fitzgerald offers, “the general distinction between ‘our civility’ and ‘their barbarity’ may be a near-universal” (110). Instead of “religion,” we may want to transfer our attention to the range of negotiations between civility and barbarity to describe affects and effects made by divinely infused habits, rituals, creeds, and nations.

Fitzgerald thus aspires to write a critical history of “religion” in order to supply this new glossary. At its most successful, this book offers a history of religion in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, albeit through materials drawn from assemblages made by C. H. Williams's English Historical Documents, vol. 5, 1485–1558 (1967); Andrew Browning, English Historical Documents, vol. 8, 1660–1714 (1953); and Charles Lloyd's nineteenth-century compendium of sixteenth-century materials, Formularies of Faith Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Henry VIII (1825). To emphasize that Fitzgerald's source material is redacted is not to dismiss the merit of the labor; in this, Fitzgerald has admirable company, as the tradition of criticism to which he seeks to be a member has made thorough interventions with anthologies in hand. Fitzgerald forgets, however, that this tradition requires textual dexterity of the highest order to compensate for the absence of any rigorous comparative or archival interventions into the canon of thought. “My working hypothesis,” Fitzgerald claims at the outset, “is that it is only by looking at categories in relation, rather than assuming their discrete functionality, that the field of religion can be adequately analyzed” (7). This hypothesis begs specificity: categories in relation to what? To one another in a particular moment in time? Within a particularly telling text? Or within a particular set of intellectual problems? Any one of these relations, considered consistently and thoroughly, would have made Fitzgerald's selections more “adequately analyzed.” The most refined argument is, not surprisingly, his most distilled (chapter 7), on travel writer Samuel Purchas and his magisterial Purchas, his Pilgrimage; or, Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in all Ages (1613). Here, Fitzgerald focuses his scattershot long enough to practice close reading, text criticism, and cultural reflection to serious accomplishment, proving that Purchas may indeed have conjured a “secular” from his obsessive (near ritual) consumption of the religious.

The idiosyncrasy of documentation nonetheless pervades the remaining chapters, as Fitzgerald nominates texts for which he refuses to offer any historiography. J. H. Parry's The Spanish Theory of Empire in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Octagon, 1940) and W. R. Jones's “The Image of the Barbarian in Medieval Europe” (Comparative Studies in Society and History 13:4 [October 1971]: 376–407), two works heavily traversed by Fitzgerald, are secondary sources worth making primary, yet Fitzgerald offers no transparency about that maneuver from history to historiography, from theory to mandated method. He presumes that the texts he nominates are collectively concurred components of a currently concurred naturalization of religion, when this is a point he must argue. Unlike Talal Asad, David Chidester, or Jonathan Z. Smith, Fitzgerald does not see it as the task of a critical historian to historicize. “I am not a historian and do not have any original historiography to add,” Fitzgerald explains. “My concern is methodological” (167). If his claim is that this is a methodological intervention and not a historiographic one (a differentiation that seems somewhat contrived), then he must make apparent this methodology. Despite two chapters (2 and 3) devoted to a description of methodology, this reviewer cannot name any process or tactics that Fitzgerald recommends which could be replicated to verify the substance of the argument.

To disagree so vociferously with Fitzgerald's mode is not to dispute his possible insight. Maybe Fitzgerald is right that “religious studies is an agency for uncritically formulating and legitimating” the myth of religion, for “embedding it into the warp and woof of our collective consciousness” (9). As a student and a member of multiple departments of religious studies, this reviewer has to squint to see what Fitzgerald sees, to perceive some sort of collective rigidity that is replicated in every maneuver. At the level of the department—the most disciplinary aspect of religious studies—it seems more accurate to describe thoughtful dispute and inter-field inconsistency as the signal tropes. That these rascally squads have also, as Fitzgerald accuses, been blindly suckered into accepting a large set of etymological fallacies (relying organizationally upon words “empty of any specific content”) might be so, too, but only if you believe the category itself overrides every meeting, dissertation defense, or journal article adjudication (40). No one would dissent from acceding that, to borrow from Ludwig Wittgenstein, our words make our worlds. Yet Fitzgerald imagines we have had only one way to imagine our shared words. Such a supposition suggests to me that his dictionary and his conversations are far more pallid than the departments, monographs, and conferences to which he directs his tirade. The task of scholarship should be to cajole our better attentions: to words, to fallacies, to any unthinking acquiescence. Telling us that we are using something uselessly is potentially productive. Doing so with such resistance to its realities of practice—even as it is these realities by which the original ire was inflamed—is not very disciplined, nor, as the hope may be, terribly revolutionary.