Graham Ward: True Religion

Abstract

Secularism is about to implode, Graham Ward warns the reader; one can see the signs of a return of the religious in the cultural arena and in the consumer market. The book is dedicated to interpreting the manifestations of this return of the religious and, to a great extent, devoted to helping religion find its way out of the consumer market to a more appropriate home. In True Religion, Ward undertakes to explain how religion ended up in the consumer market in the first place and under what guises by revisiting, in a remarkable tour de force, more than five hundred years of cultural and political history. This genealogy of religion is constructed by alternating broad panoramic views of the cultural matrices in which the changes in the understanding of religion occurred with powerful close readings of key texts that allow Ward to investigate religion’s “formations and transformations as a discourse” (3) from the sixteenth-century to the present. The story of the various transformations of religion since the advent of modernity has been told by specialists from diverse fields — ranging from political science and sociology to religious studies, literary studies, and psychoanalysis. Quite often, the story of religion is told in relation to something else: an account of the rise of the European nation-state, or the birth of liberalism, or the emergence of secularism and the Enlightenment. Ward, however, drawing on a wide variety of specialized voices and discourses (Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virillio, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, Stephen Greenblatt) does not lose sight of religion itself: religion as lived, imagined, understood, puzzled, and worried over Review Essay: Graham Ward: True Religion