Abstract
A significant function of the category “religion” is demarcating and insulating particular claims of special knowledge — but too often, Religious Studies serves to mystify and defend this function, rather than critically analysing it. Drawing on categories in which claims of special knowledge are central, including Gnosticism, conspiracy theories and esotericism, this paper will look at the history of Religious Studies scholars operating within epistemes which it should be critiquing. Yet a focus on multiple and overlapping knowledges, and competition over epistemic capital, suggests a possible future for the social-scientific study of religion.
Highlights
A significant function of the category ‘religion’ is demarcating and insulating particular claims of special knowledge – but too often, Religious Studies serves to mystify and defend this function, rather than critically analysing it
While I was still a PhD candidate, was given at the 2011 BASR conference in Durham, UK. It looked at UFOs in New Age conspiracy theories – a very basic version of what would eventually evolve into my doctoral thesis, and first book, UFOs, Conspiracy Theories and the New Age: Millennial Conspiracism (2016)
I will be forever grateful that I had the wherewithal in the moment to respond with a riff on epoché: ‘I don’t evaluate truth claims – I’m a Religious Studies scholar!’ But thinking it over later, I realized that this taken-for-granted methodological maxim might not be entirely correct
Summary
The scholars of the History of Religions were drawn to Gnosticism because they found in it a kind of experiential elite knowledge common to various esotericisms, and perhaps all ‘authentic’ religion – a Third Pillar, neither faith nor reason, but somehow transcending them both. This could potentially free us of the framework inherited from Christianity and colonialism, without losing a distinct object of enquiry and the unique insights afforded by scholars trained in the study of religion As such, this would see Religious Studies moving to an approach influenced by social epistemology (Fuller 2002) or the sociology of knowledge (McCarthy 1996). Synthetic knowledge links numerous smaller pieces of data across time, space, and context (and sometimes incompatible forms of epistemic capital) to create a ‘bigger picture’ This practice of ‘dot-connecting’ creates highly suggestive narratives in the linkages, the blurring of the specific details, and the mystification of the selection process. Each of these is set within a broader sociopolitical discourse in which science and tradition are presented as authoritative, with other claims controlled either through domestication via religious institutions and legal protections for ‘faith’ communities, or stigmatization via categories such as ‘conspiracy theories’
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