Editorial

Unfortunately, this is a somewhat delayed issue of Culture and Religion. In January of this year (2019), I had a very close encounter with my mortality – I underwent emergency open-heart surgery for an aortic dissection (a splitting of my aorta), which I only survived due to the excellence of the medical care at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. (For this, I cannot extol highly enough the ‘socialised’ universal medical care system of the Scottish NHS, which makes such life-saving surgery accessible for all.) Needless to say, I am very glad to still be around, and I see everything I do (on both the personal and professional level) in a very different way: from the time of my medical emergency onwards is, quite simply, a bonus. I am still in the process of recovery. So my apologies to all for the delay in the finalisation of this issue.

As I write, we are just months away from the journal reaching its twentieth anniversary. When issue 21.1 arrives at some time in the first quarter of 2020, it will be two decades since Culture and Religion was initially launched (back in early 2000, then as a twice-yearly journal by Curzon Press).

There has been a lot of continuity and change since that time, both for the journal and for myself as its editor, as you would expect. But also, the discipline and the field of studies which Culture and Religion serves have also changed and developed, largely in ways which could not have been easily foreseen back in 1999. I intend to address this in more detail in an editorial for the twentieth-anniversary edition, along with a discussion of where I would like to see the journal – and of course the study of religion and culture – to develop over the next two decades (which hopefully I will still be around to see).

In anticipation of that, although there has been a lot of excellent scholarship in this time that has been researched, written and published in areas close to the journal’s remit – some of which we have had the pleasure to publish here – I would sum up the situation in 2019/20 as somewhat negative and depressing, particularly in Britain (of course, Brexit notwithstanding). Ten years of public government-led austerity and the introduction of high student fees in England have severely squeezed (that is, largely decimated) the teaching of religious studies in universities (see British Academy 2019), and thus surviving units have had to make do with whatever funds and opportunities they have been able to find.

This is together with a rampant and brutal casualisation of teaching staff (in both Britain and north America), so that most academic teaching is now done by scholars without any job security (often on precarious semester-only contracts), on very low pay that does not show any recognition of their experience, skills and the work they actually do, and nearly always with no support for research time. The last point is quite bitterly ironic given the UK government’s (and most universities’) public commitment to ‘research excellence’ and quality.

Needless to say, the first two issues not only undermine the staff who still dedicate themselves to teaching, but also undermine the universities’ own commitments to ‘teaching excellence’. Indeed, it should be asked, how can leading centres for teaching the study of religion expect to be able to achieve such teaching excellence, when they pay the academics who deliver the bulk of that teaching barely at the rate of the minimum wage? Stories are told of cases where members of academic staff find themselves paid an even lower salary per hour than their students who are casually temping in local coffee shops. In short, so much excellent scholarship in the field literally goes to waste – usually due to the underfunding, underemployment and the precarity of early-career scholars having to give up on academic life.

There has been a very significant failure of policy and management by both the national higher education funders (in governments) and also within the universities. The result of this has been a slow-burning crisis of staffing and overall teaching and research capacity that is simply not sustainable. As I write this in December 2019, the national union of university workers in Britain (the UCU) is in the midst of a large-scale strike to try to address these and other problems within the university sector.

And one of the direct consequences of this is that staff coming into the academy without the social and financial capital required to survive in this brutal environment – that is staff from minority and marginalised social locations, such as academics of colour, LGBTQ+, from working-class backgrounds, and other women – are further marginalised and discriminated against (Sian 2019; Bhopal 2018). In the meantime, the main resources of academia remain clustered in elitist organisations, which have the least engagement with or investment in the challenges of such diversification.

This crisis (which has strong parallels with related developments in north America and elsewhere) may seem a long way from the day to day issues of an academic journal, such as Culture and Religion. But it is the hostile environment in which contemporary scholars have to try to survive, it is the air that we breathe. It is the wall that has been built to keep out so much emerging scholarship. And, of course, the research that we publish in this journal comes out of this context, and indeed the copies of this journal that are sold back to university libraries are used further for teaching and research that feeds into where we aim to take this project in the cultural study of religion. And so, in short, my optimism for both the vitality and the development of this field at the present time is not quite so high as it was in the more ‘plentiful’ days of the 1990s when this journal came into existence. The high quality and innovation of research remains, but the desperate scramble for resources in the UK (and the US) universities has not been helpful.

It is very easy (and tempting) to portray one aspect of what has been happening in terms of a resurgence of the enduring ‘theology’ part of the tenuous but often institutional links between theology and religious studies. That is, most non-theological departments of religion (and religious studies) that seemed sustainable 20 years ago have faded away or been subsumed within theology subject areas, which have far more legacy funding such as endowments (i.e. from churches and other institutions).

However, I have been working round to an exploration of this in terms of other questions, relating to the history of the field of religious studies – of which the theology/RS divide is just one part. That is, the main problem is the historical, colonial roots of the discipline and the way that this has constructed the subject matter of its teaching and research (in particular, the focus on religion and religions). As the journal was starting, the questions of orientalism, colonialism and the modern invention of the concept of religion were just developing. I think here, in particular, of former distinguished colleagues of mine at the University of Stirling, such as King (1999) and Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), along with other contributions made around that time by Russell McCutcheon (1997) and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005). One very provocative outcome of this has been the large body of scholarship around the ‘Critical Religion’ term, as well as the very powerful critique of what is now largely talked about as the problems of the ‘world religions paradigm’ (see, Owen 2011; Nongbri 2015, and the collection of papers edited in; Cotter and Robertson 2016).

In short, where this leaves me is the realisation of three major points that have been bubbling away for the past two decades. First, that (of course) the idea of ‘religion/religions’ is a modern construction – it is a product of modernity and colonialism, it was part of the ideological technology of colonial rule, both in empires and in the metropoles (Asad 1993, 2003). Second, that the modernist construction of the category of religion is racialised, gendered and sexualised, and needs to be understood using a framework that puts these critical frameworks to use (e.g. Hawthorne 2013; Miller and Driscoll 2019; Ahmed 2017; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Brintnall 2013; Smith 2019; Goodwin forthcoming; Wilcox forthcoming). And third, related to both of these, the disciplinary creation of the modern subject area of the ‘study of religion’ was not an organic growth out of some pre-existing (‘sui generis’) reality, it was informed by and created to manage (and govern) that gendered/racialised ideology of modernity/coloniality.

Those who are studying religion – that is the scholars and students who are engaging with, reading and (hopefully) writing for a journal such as Culture and Religion – are all taking part in this aspect of colonial ideology. We can try to ameliorate that by calling it ‘postcolonial’, as we are several decades into the age of formal decolonisation from colonial rule by European powers – for the most part – although, of course, settler colonialism is still thriving across the globe, in places such as Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and north America (see, for example, Moreton-Robinson 2015, 2016; Wolfe 2016; Estes 2019; Coulthard 2014). All this notwithstanding, the modern idea of both religion and religions is a product of this historical and contemporary colonialism, and there is a lot of work still to be done on how that can be unpacked and understood. As I have written in a recent paper on ‘decolonizing the study of religion’:

Is the study of religion a rotten fruit of the poisoned tree of colonialism? … If the study of religion was effectively decolonized, then possibly there would be very little left standing of the current discipline … (Nye 2019, 1)

I do, of course, recognise that this is a very challenging perspective, especially for those like me who have spent a lot of time trying to work within (as well as against the grain of) the disciplinary structures of the ‘study of religion’.

But it also takes us back to the initial purpose of the creation of this journal, as something that aims to go beyond the specifics of the discipline and to work with ideas and colleagues elsewhere – particularly in cultural studies and anthropology (which do, of course, also have their own historical, colonial legacies, Bhambra 2013; Bejarano et al. 2019).

What I am saying, for now, in this brief intervention is quite simply that the disciplinary formation of religious studies – which (like much of the humanities) is one of the many products of the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial era – is not necessarily of relevance to the twenty-first-century world in which we are currently living, teaching, writing and conducting research.

Over the years as the editor of Culture and Religion, I have seen a number of ways in which scholars (often through their papers submitted to the journal) interpret the idea of what the field ‘culture and religion’ is about. My aim is to have a much clearer statement in place over the next few months to reflect the current state of play within the field – that is, to update the journal’s editorial remit that was first written in the late 1990s when the journal was established. At the heart of this will be a focus on issues of race and gender – a recognition of critical studies and questions that feed into the concept of (what gets called) religion. Culture and Religion is not a general religious study journal, and has never been so – the field is already well served in that respect. Culture and Religion was created 20 years ago to be on the edge, to ask and explore difficult and challenging issues, and to showcase the best research in the field. Even in these difficult days, I hope we can and will continue to do this.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.