UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal
July 9, 2012, 5:01 pm
Posted by Eric Bugyis
The question of what counts as “religious practice” and its protected “free exercise” has dominated much of the Catholic conversation recently, and it has figured prominently on this blog and in the magazine. My approach to the question has been largely informed by a “religious studies” perspective, which attempts to think of “religion” as an object of academic inquiry and analyze the many ways in which it is performed and negotiated by those who use the concept. This includes both believers and non-believers. The former might argue either that “religion” is a 19th-century abstraction imposed on them from without, forcing them to define what they do in very restrictive and exclusionary terms (e.g. as strictly worship), or they might embrace it for the civil protections that it offers and seek shelter under its hopefully expanding exceptions. (The USCCB, it seems to me, is currently oscillating between both of these positions.) Non-believers also might either reject the concept as a 19th-century abstraction that has long been revealed to be a social or psychological pathology that we are (hopefully) outgrowing, or they might find it useful for describing certain communities and individuals that do, in fact, seem to preserve valuable beliefs and practices that set them apart and may provide important resources for a culturally impoverished post-secular society. Regardless of which of these four options one decides to take up, it seems clear that “religion” is indeed a concept that, like all inherited traits, we are stuck with, and thus, the question, “What is religion?” remains a live one, even if your answer is that it is an illusion.
Against this “religious studies” background, Kathryn Lofton has a provocative post over at The Immanent Frame about a conference that she hosted last September at Yale on “Sex Abuse and the Study of Religion.” The participants at the conference focused primarily on the epidemic in the Catholic Church, and looking at the archive of material compiled at BishopAccountability.org, they asked, “How [are] the sex abuse cases also cases of religion?”
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