By Sebastian Lecourt (University of Houston) and Winter Jade Werner (Wheaton College)
Read the full introduction for this special issue on Transimperial Religion for free on Project MUSE.
This special issue of Victorian Studies emerged from conversations about religion and literary studies that the two of us began during graduate school. Back then, we were both writing dissertations rooted in the “religious turn” of the early 2000s—the uptick of interest in religion, secularism, and politics that grew out of the War on Terror and the American culture wars. Barely ten years into its supposed triumph, American liberal secularism seemed to be fraying. Our politicians were launching a war that they pitched as a world-historical conflict between secular democracy and religious fanaticism. Meanwhile many of those same politicians were actively seeking to reinject Christian norms into the public square. Accordingly, critics from across the humanities called for a critical examination of the idea of secularization. Was the secular the opposite of religion or in some way dialectically entangled with it? Was its “sphere of this-worldly individual freedoms, laws, and markets that were assumed to correspond to natural reason” (Fitzgerald 5) truly universal, or in fact based in some more parochial (not to say religious) conceptions? These questions had a direct bearing upon literary studies, Michael Kaufmann noted, insofar as the field had long claimed to offer an alternative to religious reading and subject-formation (616).
What struck us then—and continues to strike us—is the fact that religion has remained a difficult subject for many academic humanists to discuss. Twenty years after Stanley Fish proclaimed religion to be the “the next big thing” in literary studies (C1), the number of publications that ask why it is so hard to talk about religion in the contemporary humanities still seems to rival the number of essays actually on religion. Furthermore, the causes posited for this failure of language are many. Tracy Fessenden suggests that humanities scholars’ attempt to think seriously about religious texts and agents is hindered by their reflexive treatment of religion as a site of deeply-held, and therefore inscrutable, conviction. Other scholars, including Timothy Larson, maintain that the root of the problem must be a widespread theological illiteracy.
Interestingly, this difficulty in talking about religion seems most on display when academic humanists turn to the subject of empire. Here we have noticed another kind of boundary: one drawn between spaces in which we reflexively critique Western triumphalism and spaces where triumphalist narratives still tacitly hold sway. Western academics, typically skeptical of narratives celebrating the “march of civilization” or the “triumph of rational thought” in colonial contexts, often soften this skepticism when addressing their domestic policies, such as public health mandates or the regulation of education at home. In such cases, there’s a reluctance to consider how secularism might constitute its own brand of imperial politics because the framing of “religion” as a form of stubborn unreason still seems to explain so much. If thinking about empire requires thinking contrapuntally—thinking about the connections between metropole and colony—religion is often the site where it is hardest to connect the two.
This special issue of Victorian Studies sets out to do precisely that. Taking inspiration from Talal Asad’s maxim that religion is not some transhistorical phenomenon but instead an invented term—a concept constructed to respond to a particular set of historical circumstances—we asked six scholars to reflect upon religion’s contrapuntal connections. The essays that they produced explore how the politics of public religion in the North Atlantic world hinge upon the politics of religion in colonial settings, and probe the “significant tonal rift between studies of domestic Victorian religion, which often seek to un-demonize forms of Christian piety, and studies of imperialism that assign religion the role of chief accomplice” (Lecourt and Werner 196). Assembling the issue was an exhilarating process, not because it offered the final word on these topics, but because it suggested to us an abundance of connections between religion and empire, constellations still to be explored.
Works Cited
- Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford UP, 2003.
- Fessenden, Tracy. “The Problem of the Postsecular.” American Literary History, vol. 26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 154–67.
- Fish, Stanley. “One University under God?” Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 51, no. 18, 2005, pp. C1–C4.
- Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford UP, 2000.
- Kaufmann, Michael W. “The Religious, the Secular, and Literary Studies: Rethinking the Secularization Narrative in Histories of the Profession.” New Literary History, vol. 38, no. 4, 2007, pp. 607–28.
- Larson, Timothy. “Biblical and Theological Literacy and Victorian Studies Today.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, 2022, pp. 395–410.
- Lecourt, Sebastian, and Winter Jade Werner. “Introduction: Transimperial Religion.” Victorian Studies, vol. 66, no. 2, 2024, pp. 193–200.