The legacy of “religionization”

In recent decades many scholars have critiqued the long, tragic history of Christian prejudices and actions against other religious traditions. From the time of the early church, some followers of Jesus interpreted biblical texts in a manner hostile to the Jewish people, setting a model for conflicted interactions with other religious traditions throughout the centuries. Many observers have noted the difficult history of the term religion. Daniel Boyarin and Carlin Barton have banished the word from their English translations of ancient texts, and in his study of the Pueblo nation in the southwestern United States, archaeologist Severin Fowles concludes that religion is so problematic that it cannot be refashioned and salvaged; he proposes the term doings as a substitute. Other scholars, like historian Robert Orsi, have professed disgust not only with Catholicism but with all religions because of the evil they have done.

Marianne Moyaert, a theologian at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, has a distinguished record of scholarship on the Catholic Church’s rejection of antisemitism and the role of ritual in interreligious relations and comparative theology. In Christian Imaginations of the Religious Other, Moyaert offers a detailed history of the harmful effects of “religionization,” which she defines as “the process of selfing and othering predicated on religious difference.” Even though she defines religionization in terms of religious difference, she acknowledges that defining the term religion is problematic and is intimately intertwined with another contested term, race, in a process that she calls “religio-racialization.” She proposes that religionization, like racialization, “categorizes, essentializes, ranks, and governs people based on imaginary differences.” Her discussion could be understood as offering support for those who wish to banish the word religion and the social processes of identity formation the term represents.

Moyaert explicitly limits her discussion to European Christians, thereby disregarding the history of Asian and African Christian imaginations of the religious other, like the Church of the East’s evocative use of Buddhist and Daoist images in Tang dynasty China. In practice, Moyaert restricts herself even further to Roman Catholic and Protestant imaginations of the religious other, thereby continuing a long history of Catholic and Protestant neglect of the history and theology of Eastern Christians after the time of the early church.