This preface introduces the Volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann. It is a result of an international conference on the topic held June 7–11, 2017, at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn, Germany. The scholars gathered were interested in considering the rhetorical strategies that various social groups use to construct the category “religion” as a public, political tool. Our goals for the group included, among other things: analyzing the political interests that shape such good/bad perceptions; identifying the frequently unnoticed rhetorical practices that create this distinction between “good religion” and “bad religion”; and exploring new opportunities for critical analysis of this political dynamic that are more analytically sound.

Whether intentionally or not much of our public discourse on religion involves a subtle, but incredibly powerful, distinction between “good” and “bad” religion. The implications of these labeling practices are far-reaching, indeed, for such judgments manifest in terms such as “fundamentalist,” “radical,” and “extremist,” words that are often the gauge by which governments worldwide determine everything from the parameters of religious freedom, to what constitutes an act of terrorism, to whether certain groups receive legal protections. Conversely, it is often surprising to see how different groups that may otherwise better typify the extremist profile remain unscathed by punitive governmental or social measures because of their pre-existing social popularity or perceived normalcy. This volume argues that public inquiry into religion is guided by unspoken value judgments, which are themselves the products of rarely-discussed political interests. This volume opens with a brief discussion on the nature of the issue and its practical ramifications, demonstrating how one can analytically critique the good/bad religion rhetoric as it appears in scholarship today. From there, the book is then organized around four different social institutions through which these value judgments have been established and deployed — namely, within politics, the media, the university, and the classroom. Each of these four sections works from a central chapter that highlights a particular case study or example of this good/bad distinction at work. The three to four responses that follow extrapolate from some element of the exemplar to provide an analysis on how such rhetoric operates in that particular social realm.

This essay introduces the first section of the volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann. It contributes to an analysis of the political deployment of the good/bad religion distinction and asks what is at stake when such categories emerge as the self-evident principles upon which supposedly rigorous scholarship on religion is grounded.

This essay is written by Aaron Hughes, whose book Islam and the Tyranny of Authenticity: An Inquiry Into Disciplinary Apologetics (Equinox 2016) served as a model for all participants in the conference “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion” as we considered what shape rigorous analysis of this good/bad religion dichotomy might take. In his contribution, Hughes demonstrates how such rhetoric is highly operative in much of the subfield of Islamic religious studies and brings to light that its primary function is almost certainly to protect a specifically progressive view of Islam rather than generate and analyse historically critical data about the religion across time.

This essay responds to Aaron Hughes’s essay “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Neo-Orientalism and the Study of Religion” from the perspective of Buddhist studies, engaging with the insider/outsider problem in religious studies and questions of value-neutrality in the social sciences by challenging the often unstated view that insiders have privileged access as well as the claim that outsiders are necessarily more critical.

This introduction sets the stage for the politics section of the Volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann.

This anchoring essay of the politics section introduces some of the theoretical considerations that exist when we consider how the power of nation-states intersects with the religious groups within them. It argues that religion and nation-states are both forms of social control that often work hand in hand. While states generally delegitimize religious groups when they act in violent ways, there are some very interesting moments—namely, those that are deemed “private” and “familial” and which often disproportionately affect women and children—where such groups’ harmful behaviors are considered outside the bounds of government sanction. The author describes this as it pertains to the metzitzah b’peh (oral suction after circumcision), a practice of some ultra-orthodox Jewish groups.

This essay discusses the northern Greek tradition of fire-walking, a practice that the Greek Orthodox Church has attempted to officially ban as inconsistent with church tradition at the same time that it insists on the legitimacy of its own set of rituals. Since there is no division of church and state in the Greek context, this makes the rhetoric of “proper religion” and “proper citizen” all the more crucial.

This essay takes up Naomi Goldenberg’s interest in the construction of the private realm as a place where violence in the name of religion is often permitted. It discusses how scholars of religion are often ready and willing to politically deconstruct the category of religion even as they fail to see the politics that underlie other categories, and considers how this plays out in the case of gender.

This essay considers the recent controversy in Canadian politics over the practice of wearing the niqab. Sheedy shows how the lines of social, political, and religious legitimacy can shift dramatically over a single symbol—in this case, a garment worn by some Muslim women—and can itself become “all things to all people” depending on the cultural context in which it is presented.

This introduction sets the stage for the media section of the Volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann.

This anchoring essay of the media section presents the CNN series Believer, hosted by Reza Aslan, as a paradigmatic example for a specific liberal progressive discussion of religion in North American mass media. It delivers a detailed description of the series (considering content, form, as well as marketing and genre of the series) and points out that Believer, rather than interjecting a critical examination of religion into the mass media, instead reinforces a series of popular perennialist ideas that are intellectually problematic. This happens primarily by portraying religion as a personal, “authentic,” universal element of human experience.

This essay focuses on the construction of academic/scholarly authority in Believer and compares it to a German production called “Mosque Report.” It uses Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic power as its theoretical framework. The focus lies with the role played by the series’ protagonists as ethnographers of sorts, who, in this role, claim a privileged access to “authentic” knowledge about the religious people they discuss. The author argues that this approach is used in order to generate hegemonic knowledge about the concept of religious diversity even as each show otherwise attempts to portray the footage it shares on religion as neutral and unmediated.

This essay analyses Believer by drawing on the work of feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey. In the 1970s, Mulvey used the term “scopophilia” to describe how filmmakers construct visually pleasing experiences for heterosexual men by framing images of women in certain ways that result in their sexual objectification. After an introduction to Mulvey’s core arguments, this perspective is applied to Aslan’s production. The essay argues that part of the scopophilia involved in watching shows like Believer (and people like Aslan, more specifically) comes not from being exposed to something new, but in the feelings of control and domestication that the audience can vicariously assert as they imagine Aslan as the show’s protagonist.

This essay situates Believer as an ideological artefact of a social formation emerging from globalized capitalism. It draws on the theoretical considerations of Louis Althusser formulated in his famous essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and argues that Believer promotes and naturalizes an individual, deregulated spiritual religion that fits the demands of a transnational capitalist class. More specifically, the essay shows how Believer celebrates the notion that religion is the outcome of renegade individualists who can freely choose their religious paths outside of the hand of social constraints. The outcome is the marketing of a kind of “good” religion that does the work of naturalizing the conditions that have made such a transnational class possible.

This essay compares Believer with a German documentary called “What Do You Believe In?”. This documentary differs from Believer in some regards. It fully relies on an insider approach that is not interrupted by an (academic) expert-presenter like Aslan. “What Do You Believe In?” does not present an exotic other, but apparently “normal” young people living their religion in a pluralistic society. The essay argues that this form of representation helps to legitimize and authorize a specific populist image of religion as “real,” and thus as “authentic” and “good,” while subtly allowing the audience to delegitimize other forms of religion that do not directly manufacture “good citizens” who secure the stability of the community.

This introduction sets the stage for the university section of the Volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann.

This anchoring essay of the university section discusses the “new campus religion” of “political correctness” as identified by mass-media commentators like William Deresiewicz and others. The authors analyse these current debates in light of the volume’s interest in the public rhetoric of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ religion, and focus on two things: first, the role played by the polemical use of ‘religion’ and adjacent terminologies in the descriptions of current protests; second, how an insider/outsider logic familiar to the study of religion seems to be at play in these controversies; Moving beyond this case study, the essay asks what the study of religion can learn in regard to the often discussed insider/outsider problem by drawing on feminist standpoint theory to better understand the epistemic effects of marginalization and oppression.

This essay focuses on the relationship of scholarly normativity and political pressure. Drawing on the work of Russell T. McCutcheon and Thomas Gieryn, the author argues that scholars are always engaged as public intellectuals and involved in negotiating the boundaries of what can count as real scholarship. In a “post-truth world” the study of religion is challenged to recognize the constructedness of the stories it tells, but at the same time has to demonstrate the value of a perspective that constantly questions normative claims in scholarship and the broader society.

This essay explores the ‘rhetoric of good and bad religion’ in regard to recent scholarship on ‘non-religion.’ Engaging with Aaron Hughes description of the ways in which this rhetoric is active in ‘Islamic Religious Studies,’ the author demonstrates that scholars writing on ‘non-religion’ equally make use of these tropes. He also argues that such rhetoric allows ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ moderates to build alliances against anything that is seen to challenge the legitimacy of the liberal, secular state. The conclusion points out that the Christian assumptions perpetuated by non-religion studies and its tacit promotion of neoliberal values have to be critically reflected upon.

This essay provides elements of a sociology of knowledge perspective on the contemporary student protests examined in Hermann and Priester’ essay. The author argues that a new ideal of the university as a ‘safe space’ becomes apparent in the protest discourse. In pointing to some research desiderata, the essay addresses the theoretical foundations of the protesters and suggests that what is needed is a Historical Encyclopaedia dealing with the new vocabularies and the traveling of the concepts employed by students.

This introduction sets the stage for the university section of the Volume “Hijacked: A Critical Treatment of the Public Rhetoric of Good and Bad Religion,” edited by Leslie Dorrough Smith, Steffen Führding, and Adrian Hermann.

The anchoring essay of the classroom section reflects on the author’s university classroom experience teaching about New Religious Movements (NRMs) at a British university. NRMs and “cult” groups are often considered outside of the religious mainstream by scholars of religion, and thus scholars of NRMs spend substantial time discussing the politics of definition that frame their subjects in this way. Yet the author argues that a particular folk-sensibility about religion was more common among his students, who were more likely to judge something a “real” religion based on its adherence to markers quite different than those upon which scholars rely. The essay ultimately shows that the act of teaching critical thinking as it regards the construction of the category “religion” is just as much about understanding students’ own colloquial definitions as it is engaging scholars’ categories.

This essay on teaching in the context of a Japanese university demonstrates that colloquial definitions of religion that are common in Japan make it very difficult for Japanese students to avoid categorizing religions as “good” and “bad,” particularly when they are learning about classical sociological theories of religion. The author argues that because such theories make Western presumptions about religion’s nature that are quite different from traditional Japanese conceptualizations of the concept, the use of the term “religion” is virtually meaningless in this setting.

This essay focuses on religion in the school classroom to reflect on “legitimate” and “illegitimate” religion as these concepts are discussed at different levels of educational systems in Europe. In most German federal states, religion is taught in what the author calls “separative contexts,” dividing pupils according to their religious affiliation. Such confessional models are not based on teaching knowledge about these religions but are designed to instruct the pupils on how to live a good life as a Christian, or Muslim, etc. Traditional ideas about the ‘world religions’ are therefore reproduced, leaving no space to consider why and how this particular set of religions has been normalized as legitimate (and therefore worthy of educational attention). As the author’s experience in Lower Saxony shows, the political processes involving the study of religions in the drafting of curricula for such school subjects as values and norms (the obligatory alternative for the ‘non-religious’) means having to navigate a complex hierarchy of existing understandings of the legitimacy and illegitimacy, as well as the good and bad nature, of particular religions.

This essay discusses a small controversy in the 2010s about the acceptance of Druidry into the Inter Faith Network UK. The example shows how government commissions and organisations are in the business of domesticating religion, leading groups like the Druids to conform to “liberal Protestant” ideas of religion. In the classroom, the discussion of NRMs, Pagans, and other marginal groups often contrasts them to the ‘classical’ world religions, making it hard to question underlying assumptions about how religion as a category is rendered. Instead of ‘religious literacy’ in the ‘great traditions’ built on a theological model, what is needed, according to the author, is ‘religion literacy’, or an understanding of the construction of ‘religion’ as a category and the interests served by these processes.

Whether intentionally or not much of our public discourse on religion involves a subtle, but incredibly powerful, distinction between “good” and “bad” religion. The implications of these labeling practices are far-reaching, indeed, for such judgments manifest in terms such as “fundamentalist,” “radical,” and “extremist,” words that are often the gauge by which governments worldwide determine everything from the parameters of religious freedom, to what constitutes an act of terrorism, to whether certain groups receive legal protections. Conversely, it is often surprising to see how different groups that may otherwise better typify the extremist profile remain unscathed by punitive governmental or social measures because of their pre-existing social popularity or perceived normalcy. This volume argues that public inquiry into religion is guided by unspoken value judgments, which are themselves the products of rarely-discussed political interests. This volume opens with a brief discussion on the nature of the issue and its practical ramifications, demonstrating how one can analytically critique the good/bad religion rhetoric as it appears in scholarship today. From there, the book is then organized around four different social institutions through which these value judgments have been established and deployed — namely, within politics, the media, the university, and the classroom. Each of these four sections works from a central chapter that highlights a particular case study or example of this good/bad distinction at work. The three to four responses that follow extrapolate from some element of the exemplar to provide an analysis on how such rhetoric operates in that particular social realm.