Russell T. McCutcheon and Normative Scholarship

It is not uncommon for prominent critical religion academics to question the suitability of scholarship which makes normative statements and value judgements – scholarship which has an explicit political agenda, and which uses its research to promote particular constructions of ‘religion’. For instance, Russell T. McCutcheon (2018), in his book Fabricating Religion, critiques examples of scholarship that make normative judgements to suggest specific constructions of ‘religion’ are more progressive or just than others. McCutcheon argues that as every category and metric system is merely part of a local lexicon and worldview, any application of them in the service of evaluation can only produce subjective results. That is, what is progressive and just to one person is regressive and unjust to another. Consequently, value judgements tell us more about the scholar making them than they do about the phenomenon they attempt to classify (98). For McCutcheon, scholars of religion should be social critics who do not make value judgements themselves but only analyse the motivations behind scholarship that does – deconstructing it to demonstrate how it reflects not intrinsic values such as progressive or just, or regressive or unjust, in an objective sense, but the self-interest of the scholar making the judgement.

But McCutcheon’s position, and similar positions taken by other critical religion academics (for instance, Aaron Hughes), is logically inconsistent. Thus, McCutcheon makes the above arguments in a chapter, ‘Varieties of Critical Scholarship’, which has the primary purpose of distinguishing between different types of critical scholarship in order to argue that one kind – the one that McCutcheon supports – is the most suitable for the study of religion. That is, the purpose of the above arguments is to champion McCutcheon’s construction of critical scholarship over and against what he labels uncritical scholarship; delegitimising scholars who make normative claims in order to make normative claims about what is critical and uncritical. But logically there is no difference between the two exercises; if both arguments are grounded in intersubjective standards, why cannot one scholar forward an argument which wishes to construct ‘religion’ in a certain way and another forward an argument which wishes to construct ‘critical’ in a certain way? Others may disagree with what counts as ‘progressive’ or ‘just’, but then others disagree with McCutcheon as to what counts as ‘critical’. It seems McCutcheon simply wants to disentangle the study of religion from any normative agenda that wishes to change a societal status quo as, in his view, critical scholarship should remain politically passive.

McCutcheon claims he does not support apolitical research because he subscribes to discredited notions of objectivity (104). Indeed, if he did, it would undermine his argument that all scholarship is subjective. But in the same chapter, McCutcheon argues that ‘the scholar of religion qua social critic (unlike a film critic who rates films so that moviegoers can pick which to watch) implies working at a distance from the situations under analysis, historicizing the items he or she may study, and thereby endeavouring to examine their conditions, workings, and effects – doing so regardless whether the scholar feels anything from […] sentiments of affinity to estrangement toward the situations or people under examination’ (99; emphasis added). Thus, McCutcheon argues against normative studies of religion as he suggests such studies need to be deconstructed through a critical focus, a focus which uncovers their subjective nature; however, to demonstrate the subjective nature of normative arguments,  McCutcheon seems to uphold the ethos of objective scholarship, arguing that normative scholarship should be deconstructed in an objective way.

The solution to these logical inconsistencies is to embrace the normative nature of scholarship, seeing it as merely subjective but functional – possessing an ability to construct the category of religion, and the society it helps to produce, in a way that moves them both in a direction the scholar sees as desirable. This is not the failure of scholarship; the failure of scholarship is the attempt to achieve change based on disguised realist arguments which are not explicit about their subjective nature or purpose. 

Jack Lewis Graham: Empty Voices Pamphlet.