Simone Weil on Religion as a Social Structure

Academics who study religion will tend to focus on it as the sort of thing amenable to academic study. For neuroscientists this might mean an interest in mapping the brain activity of people engaged in meditation or meditative prayer.

For social scientists, this usually means treating religion as a social or cultural phenomenon, a form of human organization whose dynamics can be analyzed.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this--as long as the academic doesn't jump to the conclusion that religion is reducible to what falls within the academic's sphere of study. "Religion is just a distinctive kind of brain activity," or "Religion is just a social structure of a certain kind, organized to achieve a particular purpose in the human world."

Because social scientists have a higher level of academic interest in religion than one finds in the natural sciences, the latter mistake strikes me as more common. For Emile Durkheim, religion just is a particular way of organizing human beings for social purposes. If it has effects that aren't strictly related to these social purposes, they're epiphenomena.

It's been said that to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Were it up to me I'd change the saying to this: To a person with a gun, everyone looks like an intractable threat. Of course, in neither case is the saying strictly true. People with hammers don't always start smashing away at their own kneecaps, mistaking them for nails. And gun owners haven't universally shot their sleeping children and then claimed self defense.

But the exaggeration highlights a point: We like to use the tools we have. And so we look for ways to make things fit those tools. Enough people start doing this and effects can ripple. In a world with lots of guns, even those without guns are more inclined to see the world as a place full of bad guys who won't respond to anything but a gun.

Let's call this the "hammer effect," in honor of the usual adage. When it comes to religion, I see the hammer effect most clearly in a pervasive tendency--especially among those who aren't themselves religious--to view religion as essentially a social phenomenon, to the exclusion of other things.

Let me be clear. I think the social dimension of religion is real, and it's important. But to reduce religion to its social dimension makes it difficult, to say the least, to know what to do about someone like Simone Weil, the early 20th Century French philosopher, political activist, social critic, and mystical theologian.

It would be hard to speak of Weil without seeing her as deeply religious. Leslie Fiedler has called her "a special exemplar of sanctity for our time--the Outsider as Saint in an age of alienation, our kind of saint." This description captures, in a single breath, the fascinating paradox that Weil embodies. She was raised by secular Jews, became a religious mystic fascinated with the crucified Christ, whom she claimed to have encountered in transcendent religious experience. She rigorously--I would say religiously--recited the Lord's Prayer with "absolute attention"--starting again from the beginning if her thoughts strayed even once.

And she consistently rebuffed the efforts of her Catholic friend and confessor, Father Perrin, to convince her to be baptized. She held herself forever the outsider, self-consciously so. When pressed by Father Perrin, she explained her reasons in many ways. Here is a notable excerpt from her correspondence with him:

What frightens me is the Church as a social structure. Not only on account of its blemishes, but from the very fact that it is something social. It is not that I am of a very individualistic temperament. I am afraid for the opposite reason. I am aware of very strong gregarious tendencies in myself. My natural disposition is to be very easily influenced, too much influenced, and above all by anything collective. I know that if at this moment I had before me a group of twenty young Germans singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of my soul would instantly become Nazi...

There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong. I cannot go against the light of conscience. If I think that on this point I see more clearly than they did, I who am so far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure. If this social structure did them harm, what harm would it not do me, who am particularly susceptible to social influences and who am almost infinitely more feeble than they were?

Weil, here, seems to be trying to stake out a way of being in the world that deliberately resists any participation in religion as a social phenomenon. But her way of being in the world is so powerfully religious in so many ways that it seems absurd, at least to me, to say that in separating herself from religion as a social structure she was separating herself from religion.

That's not it at all. For her, religion and the Church were much more than a social structure. And what she sought to stand apart from was only this social aspect of something with roots far deeper and wider than can be encompassed by the social. Her success in doing so is a measure of the extent to which the religious transcends the social.

In sharing her example here, I do not mean to advocate her trenchant resistance to participation in the social aspect of religion. My point is to offer Simone Weil as an example of someone who found faith outside the boundaries of religious communities, who staked out her religion in the space between faith communities--or, perhaps, in the space where all such divisions break down.

My own instinct would be to advocate, not her self-conscious resistance to belonging, but a way of belonging that is informed and transformed by a self-conscious allegiance to what is universal, what unites, what spills over or dissolves social boundaries, what cannot be subject to social control and cannot be locked within a social structure. Any social organization that isn't defined by such a higher allegiance--that isn't transformed by it--isn't ultimately religious at all.

As I see it, what Weil was resisting was that within real human religious life that has the power to eclipse what is most essential to religious life. And she resisted it not because she hated community and social organization but because she loved that essence more.

Is it possible that when religion is defined as nothing but a social structure, and when it is described and characterized with that assumption in place, that what is being described is precisely what is left when Weil's fears are realized, when religion has been stripped away and all that remains are its social trappings?

Religion and Essential Contestability: Excerpt from an article

Today in my philosophy of religion class, we discussed the complexity of the term "religion" and the ways in which competing usage leads to misunderstanding and confusion. I talked about religion as a family resemblance concept, and then proposed my theory that in the contemporary "God debates," the concept of "religion" functions (or fails to function) as an "essentially contested concept with a twist."

Some of these ideas will be familiar to regular followers of this blog, since I've discussed them here before (such as the last time the topic came up my my philosophy of religion class). However, since much of the background ideas probably went by quite quickly in class, I decided that I would post on this blog--for my students as well as for anyone else who is interested--the way I described and developed this theory in a a recent article, "Moving the Goalposts? The Challenge of Philosophical Engagement with the Public God Debates," that came out a little while back in  Philo: A Journal of Philosophy. What follows is an excerpt (and may be the penultimate version, since it is what I had on my computer). Those interested in the entire article can find it in Philo vol. 13 (Spring-Summer 2010), pp. 80-93.

In my book I hold that “religion” is a family resemblance term, which makes univocal talk about the merits and demerits of religion difficult. One needs to specify what one is talking about to avoid equivocations leading to false generalizations. A main contention of the book is that the New Atheists fail to do this.


Precisely because I was so explicit about this point up front, the charge that I was “re-defining” religion to make it immune to New Atheist criticisms puzzled me. But then I noticed a pattern. Progressive religious readers of my book had no trouble seeing what I was describing and defending as religion—in fact, their kind. Conservative Christian readers, while unhappy with my failure to defend their religion (and with my heresies), agreed that what I was defending was a species of religion. It was those in the New Atheist community who were apt to accuse me of “re-defining” religion. When I’ve been able to investigate the matter (mainly with my students), I’ve found that those most likely to level this criticism are precisely those who have been most “stung” by oppressively narrow-minded forms of religion (such as those common in the Bible Belt where I teach).

So what are we to make of this? What I’ve concluded is that Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance” notion is of less value for understanding contemporary use of “religion” than W.B. Gallie’s notion of essentially contested concepts. Put simply, I’ve become increasingly convinced that “religion” is an essentially contested concept, but with a twist.

To call it an essentially contested concept is to say that part of the normal use of the term is that different users attach different senses to it, resulting in differences in extension. But this competing usage is unified by a shared set of complex paradigms (which embody numerous features) and an agreed appraisive meaning. With an essentially contested concept, the competing definitions represent competing views about which features of the paradigms warrant the appraisal associated with the term.

The idea here is that some terms have come to be so closely aligned with a certain kind of normative appraisal that we cannot sever the term from the appraisal. If anything is univocally intended by the term, it’s this appraisal. Hence, to insist on a specific descriptive definition among rivals is to insist that the extension of a particular normative judgment should have these parameters rather than some alternative. Rather than risk having legitimate normative disputes silenced by an insistence of uniformity of meaning, Gallie advocates treating some terms as essentially contested.

In short, acknowledging essential contestability is supposed to ensure that a normative dispute—about, say, which acts should be condemned in the way that paradigms of terrorism are condemned, or which human creations should be honored in the way we honor exemplars of art—is not shut down by a kind of definition fiat. But unlike “art,” whose appraisive meaning is positive, or “terrorism,” whose appraisive meaning is negative, “religion” has come to be used such that there are two competing communities of discourse, each using the term in an essentially contested way. But whereas one community of discourse treats “religion” as a positive appraisive concept and seeks to gauge which features of the paradigms warrant the positive appraisal, the other treats it as a negative one and seeks to judge which features warrant the negative appraisal. When a concept comes to be used in this way, we might call it a “bifurcated essentially contested concept.”

My book adopts the language game of that community of discourse which attaches a positive appraisive meaning to “religion.” As such, I look at the complex paradigms of religion in the world (which contain many elements I view negatively), and then seek to isolate the elements which justify the positive appraisal. What results is a picture of theistic religion which preserves those features of the paradigms that warrant the positive appraisal while acknowledging that much in the “real religions” of the “real world” deserve the criticisms of the New Atheists.

But if religion is understood to be an essentially negative concept, then if all the features that justify the negative appraisal are purged from it the result will not be seen as “religion” at all. And so the cry of “That’s not religion!” makes sense. It’s as if one community of discourse attaches to the term “sex” the appraisive meaning that typically attaches to “rape,” while another attaches to it the appraisive sense of “making love.” The former group looks at the range of phenomena that go by the label “sex” (ignoring, of course, those phenomena which no one would ever call rape) and tries to identify what justifies the negative appraisal. The latter does the same (ignoring the phenomena, such as rape paradigms, which no one would ever call “making love”), in the attempt to identify the parameters within which the positive appraisal is warranted. The latter holds up its results, saying, “This is the kind of sex (by which we mean making love) that deserves label!” The former protests, “That’s not sex (by which we mean rape) at all!”

Once again Christopher Hitchens offers an excellent case study for this phenomenon. Not long ago Hitchens was interviewed by a Unitarian Universalist minister, Marilyn Sewell—and one of the most striking features of their conversation is just how much they agree upon. Not only do they agree about the presumed offenses of conservative religious communities, but also about the importance, for human life, of a sense of what Hitchens calls “the numinous”—a sense which Hitchens himself describes, at one point in the interview, as the experience or feeling “that there is more to life than just matter.”

But, of course, Marilyn Sewell not only describes herself as religious but is a clergy person for the liberal Unitarian Universalist Church, while Hitchens describes himself not merely as an atheist, but as an “antitheist,” by which he means someone who is actively opposed to religion and belief in God. How is it possible that two persons can have such similar views not only about specific religious communities and their practices but about what Hitchens calls “the numinous” (a term coined by theologian Rudolph Otto to describe the human encounter with the transcendent), and yet can take such antithetical stands towards “religion,” one identifying with a religious community and the other insisting that “religion poisons everything”? If the former attaches a positive appraisive sense to the term “religion” and sifts through the paradigms of religion to identify what justifies the positive appraisal (leaving off what is negative), while the latter attaches a negative sense to the term and so defines it in terms of those things left out of the former’s understanding, we can readily understand what has happened. If, as seems to be true of Hitchens and Sewell, the underlying value systems according to which the paradigms of religion are assessed by each are substantially the same, the one will include in her understanding of religion the very things that will be excluded from the other’s.

And so, from Hitchens' standpoint, Sewell’s religion isn’t religion at all. Likewise in relation to the new atheists, what I defend in my book isn’t religion all. And this may be why I am accused of “moving the goal posts.” While I’m not sure what to do about this kind of “bifurcated” contested usage, there is no doubt that any scholar who wants to engage the God debates needs to be aware of it.

Practical Lessons of Reflecting on the Competing Usage of Religion

A recurring question during my philosophy of religion class on Friday had to do with what the practical lessons would be if I’m right (or on the right track) about “religion” being a bifurcated essentially contested concept—that is, a concept which is not only used in competing ways within a community of discourse (based on disagreement over which features of the religion paradigms justify the appraisive connotations of the term) but has come to be used in incommensurate ways by competing communities of discourse (insofar as each community attaches an opposing appraisive connotation to the term).


One of the points I’ve been stressing in relation to this analysis is that, while ordinary essential contestability can be valuable insofar as it prevents legitimate voices in moral dispute from being silenced through definitional fiat, the bifurcation of an essentially contested concept is not similarly valuable—but it may be a reality we have to come to grips with.

But how? Put another way, what do we do in the face of the fact that “religion” has come to be used in such conflicted ways?

After class, in conversation with a few students, I enumerated two lessons, but there are surely more. Here are the two I identified:

1) It is helpful, both when critiquing or defending “religion,” to specify what sense one has in mind and to be clear that what one has to say may not apply to religion in other senses.

2) It is not helpful, when someone else is critiquing or defending religion in some sense that they specify, to say, “But that’s not religion, so you defense/critique is irrelevant.”

(By the way, I suspect I may have been at least occasionally guilty of the latter—although sometimes what I intend to say is, “That’s not the only kind of religion, and so treating your critique as a condemnation of religion in every plausible sense is a mistake”).

But these are hardly the only lessons that might be drawn. So let me throw the question out to readers of this blog: If “religion” is a “bifurcated essentially contested concept,” what steps do we need to take to facilitate productive dialogue about the phenomena that—in competing and conflicted ways—fall within the scope of the term's divergent use?

The Concept of "Religion"

In my philosophy of religion class yesterday I gave everyone in the class a chance to give their own concise answer to the following question: “What is religion?” (To be more precise, I asked them to imagine they were being interrogated by space aliens, and that the fate of the Earth depended on their answer).


Not surprisingly, there were many diverse responses—some emphasizing social and institutional phenomena, some emphasizing beliefs or ways of looking at the world, some emphasizing practices or ways of life, and some stressing inner spiritual experience. Some definitions were, I’d say, quite gilded—that is, they used language aimed at highlighting the beauty or value of the thing being defined. Other definitions were quite the opposite. For example, one student defined religion as a system for justifying the exclusion or marginalization of people from a community.

Once I had the chalkboard covered with these various accounts, I pointed out how this diversity is also represented among scholars—with understandings of religion ranging from the more private, personal, “feeling”-oriented understanding (favored by theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and philosopher/psychologist William James), to more sociological understandings (promulgated by, for example, Emile Durkheim).

I then spent a few minutes considering the idea I advanced in my book—namely, that “religion” is what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” term (see p. 15 of Is God a Delusion? for an account of this idea). Then, in the last few minutes of the class, I turned to another approach—one that, based on some further reflection I’ve done since writing my book, I’m becoming increasingly convinced is the right one. According to this approach, “religion” is best understood as what philosopher W. B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept”—but with a twist.

Since I didn’t have time to fully explain this idea in class, I want to do so in this post. In fact, I’ve already done so on this blog—here and here. But since it’s always helpful to try to explain ideas in different ways, let me have another go at it here.

What Gallie noticed was that there are some terms whose proper use, rather than being determined by an established definition (one that sets out the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall within the term’s scope), is instead determined by a shared set of complex exemplars or paradigms along with a shared appraisive meaning. So for example, there isn’t a common definition of “rape.” Instead, there are a bunch of exemplars—sexual acts that we all agree count as rape—together with general agreement that when an act is labeled “rape” there’s a strongly negative appraisal that goes along with that.

Here’s the thing about “rape.” It just isn’t and never will be a neutral, purely descriptive term. To call something rape is (among other things) to condemn it in a particular way. That condemnation is part of the meaning of the term. And so it matters a lot whether or not a particular act qualifies as rape. Acts of rape are morally worse than other classes of sexual acts (such as seduction, say, or aggressive lovemaking, or adultery).

The paradigms of “rape” exist because there are a bunch of things that we all agree deserve to be condemned in this distinctive way. But these paradigms are complex. They have lots of different features. And we don't all agree on what it is about these paradigms that makes them deserving of the negative appraisal. And this means that there are controversial cases.

Consider: A guy keeps pressuring his high school girlfriend to have sex. She doesn’t want to. He threatens to break up with her. She closes in on herself. He backs off for a few minutes, then begins groping her again. She doesn’t resist. He undresses her. She remains totally passive and unresponsive. He puts on a condom and penetrates her.

Is it rape? More people would be inclined to say “yes” today than twenty years ago—but there are still many who’d say it isn’t, that the guy is being insensitive but isn’t a rapist.

The reason for the dispute is that there isn’t agreement about whether the boys behavior in this case deserves the negative implications of the “rape” label. In other words, this is a moral dispute about what warrants a certain kind of negative appraisal.

And moral disputes can’t be resolved through definitional fiat. Suppose someone says, “From now on, rape will mean an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration. As such, the case at hand isn’t rape.” Such a move isn’t going to just be accepted. Why? Because to call something “rape” is to say that there's a certain kind of “badness” to it—more precisely, the same kind of badness that the agreed paradigms of rape possess. And so, to define rape as “an act in which someone uses physical force to overcome a woman who is actively resisting sexual penetration” is to say, in effect, that only acts which meet these conditions are bad in the relevant way. Put another way, to define “rape” is to take a stand in a moral dispute.

And as long as there is moral dispute, to impose a uniform definition of “rape” on a community of speakers is to impose one disputed answer to a moral question on everyone in the community. This wouldn’t be merely an act of establishing a linguistic convention. It would be an act of using language to truncate debate and to effectively delegitimize certain moral views.

And this is why some concepts become essentially contested. Their being essentially contested is a good thing—a way to keep some voices in a moral debate from being illegitimately silenced through definitional fiat.

My claim is that this idea of essential contestability is useful for understanding religion—but not if we accept Gallie’s idea without modification. Religion, I think, is an essentially contested concept with a twist. And what’s the twist? Here’s how I explain it in a forthcoming article (“Moving the Goal Posts?” to be published in Philo: A Journal of Philosophy):

But unlike “art,” whose appraisive meaning is positive, or “terrorism,” whose appraisive meaning is negative, “religion” has come to be used such that there are two competing communities of discourse, each using the term in an essentially contested way. But whereas one community of discourse treats “religion” as a positive appraisive concept and seeks to gauge which features of the paradigms warrant the positive appraisal, the other treats it as a negative one and seeks to judge which features warrant the negative appraisal. When a concept comes to be used in this way, we might call it a “bifurcated essentially contested concept.”

Unlike essentially contested concepts as Gallie understood them, I’m not at all convinced that bifurcated essentially contested concepts serve a useful function. When an essentially contested concept becomes “bifurcated,” what happens? On the one hand, you have those who attach a positive appraisive meaning to the paradigms of religion. They will be formulating their definition of religion by looking for what it is about the paradigms of religion that justifies the positive appraisal (and so will sift out of their understanding of religion anything in the paradigms that warrants a negative appraisal). On the other hand, those who attach a negative appraisive meaning to "religion" will be doing to opposite. The result may be that you have two parties with virtually identical value systems, who therefore make the same appraisive judgments about the various features of the religious paradigms—but who appear to be utterly at odds. An analogy—again from my forthcoming article—can be helpful:

It’s as if one community of discourse attaches to the term “sex” the appraisive meaning that typically attaches to “rape,” while another attaches to it the appraisive sense of “making love.” The former group looks at the range of phenomena that go by the label “sex” (ignoring, of course, those phenomena which no one would ever call rape) and tries to identify what justifies the negative appraisal. The latter does the same (ignoring the phenomena, such as rape paradigms, which no one would ever call “making love”), in the attempt to identify the parameters within which the positive appraisal is warranted. The latter holds up its results, saying, “This is the kind of sex (by which we mean making love) that deserves label!” The former protests, “That’s not sex (by which we mean rape) at all!”

This, I think, is what’s going on in the conversation between Christopher Hitchens and Unitarian Universalist minister Marilyn Sewell, whose unusual debate inspired one of my recent Religion Dispatches articles. It may also help to explain some of the common charges leveled against my book—charges to the effect that I respond to the new atheists by coming up with this definition of religion that has nothing to do with real religion as it exists in the real world.

Of course, what I defend in my book has a great deal to do with actual religions—but when I look at those real-world phenomena, I’m trying to identify the features which might justify a positive appraisal (what I call the germ of a true religion that might be salvaged from the crud of “superstition” and “fundamentalism” and “religionism”). My critics, meanwhile, are sifting through the same phenomena in an attempt to identify what makes religion so bad. And what do they pinpoint? What, from my standpoint, is the crud from which true religion needs to be salvaged. And so they’re holding up the crud and calling it religion, while I’m holding up the gem that was buried in the crud. And they protest, “That’s not religion at all!”

Religion as a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept": Part II

In a comment on my last post, about the “bifurcated essential contestability” of religion, Burk wrote: “So what’s the point? The fact that some concepts are slippery enough to be re-defined to one’s taste, or one’s argumentative predilection, hardly speaks well of the original referent, does it?”

This betrays a misunderstanding, insofar as essential contestability is not merely a matter of a concept being slippery enough to allow one to define it as one pleases or to serve one's argumentative agenda. But I suspect the misunderstanding here is likely to be sufficiently widespread that I want to have another go at the idea of essential contestability. However, so as to avoid having to repeat what I’ve already said, I invite you to read or reread the previous post—as well as my clarifying comments offered as comments to it—before digging into this one.

First of all, essential contestability does offer parameters for the proper use of a term (one can’t simply define it however one pleases). But these parameters are looser than those offered by a strict definition in terms of genus and difference. The purpose of that looseness is to facilitate an ongoing normative dispute--to prevent those who, say, want to apply the term "terrorism" to domestic battery from being shut down by "definitional fiat", without having the chance to make their case for why domestic battery deserves to receive the same sort of condemnation that we attach to, say, the Oklahoma City bombing.

The worry here is this. Suppose someone tries to make the point that domestic battery is a species of terrorism, and thereby argue that the public moral outcry against terrorism (and concomitant political capital and economic resources devoted to its prevention) should extend with equal force to domestic battery, inspiring a comparable devotion of public resources. The worry is that this essentially moral argument will be unfairly silenced by essentially ad hoc definitional conventions. Someone will say, “That’s not terrorism, so shut up and go back to your NOW meeting.” The essential contestability of “terrorism” aims to prevent the invocation of such conversation-stoppers.

Some concepts have a precisely defined set of referents. Some admit of grey areas ("vague concepts")--and as I've argued elsewhere (in an article on the essential contestability of "rape"), essential contestability offers a useful way of understanding what can make a concept vague. Whether a concept has a precise meaning or is vague/contested tells us something about the function that the concept serves in the language. If the function is to regulate a certain kind of descriptive project, then it will have a precise meaning. If its function is to regulate an ongoing normative dispute, then it will be essentially contested.

But here's the thing. There would be little point in making linguistic space for normative disagreement if normativity were conceived reductionistically in terms of nothing but subjective attitudes. If the distinctive wrong of rape were just a matter of taste or nothing but a projection of psychological predilitions ("a rorsach blot," as Burk puts it in his comment), then there'd really be nothing to disagree about between those who say that a husband's cavalier disregard for his wife's disinclination to have sex makes his act rape (even though she's been socialized to quietly submit to his demands), and those who deny this. There'd be no disagreement between them because the former would be simply saying something about their tastes (they just happen to have a certain kind of distaste towards the husband’s behavior) and the latter would be simply saying something about their tastes (they lack the relevant negative attitude). But varied tastes towards the same phenomenon do not constitute disagreement. A disagreement is possible only if both parties mean to say something about the husband's behavior--the former is asserting something about it that the latter denies.

In short, real normative disagreement is possible only if there is more to the normative status of activities, projects, etc., than just the diverse attitudinal projections of different individuals.

It follows that, in order for the essential contestability of concepts to serve the function it is supposed to serve, there must be something more to normative discourse than just expressions of taste and projections of preferences onto the range of entities to which the contested concept actually or potentially refers.

The precise character of the "something more" is going to be a matter of some debate, but at the very least it will require that normative judgments be such that it is possible to offer legitimate reasons in their favor--legitimate in the sense of rendering it rationally fitting for someone to change their mind in the light of it.

Since I am convinced that there is something more to normative judgments than mere expressions of subjective preference, I am likewise convinced that essentially contested concepts serve an important linguistic function.

I am less convinced, however, that the bifurcation of an essentially contested concept--of the sort I see occuring in the case of "religion"--is helpful. Rather, while I think it may be inescapable, it creates problems for clear communication and divides the normative discourse into two communities who then have difficulty communicating their respective normative insights to the other community without being consistently misunderstood.

So, with respect to such concepts, the task is to understand how they operate so that we can better transcend the impediments.

In sum, I think the essential contestability of the concept “religion” has value, but I think that the bifurcation of it limits that value by preventing the normative insights achieved in one linguistic community (which focuses on religion’s paradigms in a purely negative way so as to identify what it is about them that justifies the negative normative judgment) from being effectively communicated to the other linguistic community (which focuses on religion’s paradigms in a purely positive way so as to identify what it is about them that justifies the positive normative judgment).

Religion as a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept"

It occured to me that at least a few readers of this blog might be interested in the core section of an e-mail that I recently sent to a philosophical colleague--in which I briefly describe the more technical philosophical idea that was percolating beneath the surface of my recent Religion Dispatches article reflecting on the Hitchens-Sewell interview. In briefest terms, I've become increasingly convinced that the concept of religion operates in a rather strange way in contemporary discourse. I've decided to call it a "Bifurcated Essentially Contested Concept."

In fact, the first draft of the RD article included a brief discussion of this more technical idea, but I decided that it didn't work for that venue. I'd either need to go into so much depth expositing the relevant ideas in the philosophy of language that the article would have this distractingly dry academic portion in the middle, or I'd end up underexplaining these ideas so much that they wouldn't be helpful.

But for those interested in the more academic side of my work, the note to my colleague is brief enough to fit in a blog but detailed enought to offer a sense of one of the philosophical projects I'm am developing. So here is what I wrote:

In brief, (the philosophical project) involves an analysis of the concept “religion” that makes use of W. B. Gallie’s notion of “essentially contested concepts.” In case you’re unfamiliar with Gallie, he understands essentially contested concepts to be characterized by (a) a shared set of complex paradigms, (b) a common appraisive meaning, and (c) disagreement over which features of the paradigms justify the appraisive judgment. Since the appraisal has become an ineradicable feature of the term’s use in ordinary language, any proposed definition takes sides in a moral dispute: by fixing the extension of the term, the definition makes a judgment about which entities should be subject to the normative appraisal that goes with the use of the term, and which shouldn’t. According to Gallie, preserving the essential contestability of a concept—that is, characterizing the “language game” of proper usage in terms of (a) and (b) and, arguably, paradigmatic examples of things that fall outside the extension of the term, rather than in terms of a conventional definition—prevents normative disputes from being ended by definitional fiat (and thereby having certain moral perspectives illegitimately silenced).

What I’ve been thinking as I get increasingly caught up in the current “God debates” is that “religion” operates today as an essentially contested concept with a twist. The twist is that, although there is a shared set of complex paradigms, there are two competing appraisive meanings—one positive and the other pejorative—and hence two communities of discourse—one disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the POSITIVE appraisal they attach to the term “religion,” the other disagreeing over which features of the paradigms justify the NEGATIVE appraisal they attach to the term. Thus conceived, Sewell is in the same community of discourse as, say, Pat Robertson, but fundamentally disagrees with him about which features of religious paradigms justify positive appraisal because they are operating from deeply opposed normative frameworks. Hitchens, by contrast, is in the opposing community of discourse, but is operating with very similar normative lenses as Sewell. The result is that her understanding of religion, derived from her culling from the paradigms that which justifies a positive judgment, falls entirely outside the scope of Hitchens’ definition of “religion” precisely BECAUSE it has been stripped of all the things that justify a NEGATIVE appraisal. But they agree about so many things that one might even start to think of Hitchens as a closet Unitarian.

Since this passage from my e-mail explicates Gallie's "essentially contested concepts" rather quickly, without the help of clarifying examples, let me just add two examples for the sake of my readers here. First, there is "work of art." We all agree that DaVinci's Mona Lisa is a work of art, and that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a work of art, etc. That is, there is a shared set of paradigms that we can all agree fall within the extension of the term. And we all attach a positive appraisive sense to the term "work of art." That is, for something to be properly called a work of art, it needs to exemplify an achievement of a certain sort. So, we agree that the paradigms exemplify this achievement. But when it comes to, say, certain post-modern creations on display in modern art museums, some will call them works of art and others will vociferously disagree. Why? Because to call it a work of art is to say that it achieves something--something of the same sort that the Mona Lisa achieves. Perhaps not in the same measure, but enough so that they both deserved to be classed as works of art.

The result is that you have clear cases of works of art--in which there is general agreement that this or that is a work of art--and borderline cases (which some will call works of art and others won't). Gallie's point is that this is well and proper, because to insist upon a strict definition with precise boundaries would be to illegitimately shut down an ongoing normative disagreement about which features of the paradigms justify the positive appraisive judgment that attaches to the term "work of art."

Here's the second example: the concept "terrorism." This one works in very much the same way, except that the appraisal that goes along with the use of the term is strongly negative. There are, again, a bunch of agreed paradigms--the 9/11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, etc.--as well as a range of contested cases. The disagreement turns on which features of the paradigms of terrorism justify the negative judgment that "terrorism" implies.

So anyway, my working theory, from my observation of the way "religion" has come to be used, is that it fits the model of essential contestability in a number of important ways--except that, crucially, some attach to the term a positive appraisive sense while others attach to it a negative one. This fact may imply other differences. Part of my current work is to tease out in a systematic way precisely WHAT other differences are entailed.