“Otherworldly” states: Reimagining the study of (civil) “religion”

Abstract

Sociologists since Durkheim have known there is nothing essential about the category “religion,” so why does the category persist? If we can begin to understand why it is still necessary in the twenty-first century for critical theorists to remind us that “religion” is without a vital differentiating element, then perhaps we might begin to imagine more, rather than less, expansive epistemological frameworks. Even as sensitive scholarship works to deconstruct the Enlightened secular typologies that gloss historical inequities, it often misses the cross-cultural patterns of signification that have shaped post-tribal hierarchies for millennia. Critically expanding Robert Bellah's earlier arguments surrounding American Civil Religion, I argue for the role of the immaterial imagination in the establishment of trans-local, supra-kin communities-both nationalist and religious. Drawing on Philo of Alexandria, Isocrates, and Rousseau, I contend that an expansive theory of otherworldliness is necessary to understand the “modern” world.