Russell McCutcheon (b. 1961) grew up inside a gas station on the north shore of Lake Erie. His parents owned it and worked it, and the family lived right there on the lot in Port Colborne, Ontario, close enough to the American shore that a boy could look across the water and see Pennsylvania. A hose lay across the drive. When a car rolled over it the pump rang, ding ding, and somebody went out to fill the tank. His father did the oil changes and the mufflers and the tires in the bay at the back. A canal cut through the town, and the lakers took it to skip Niagara Falls on their runs to and from the sea.
He was not a good student. The night before a test he had not prepared for, his policy was to close the hatch and ride out the storm, which meant he watched television and went to bed early. He sat the MCAT thinking he might become a doctor. The score came back low. He had skipped a lot of class.
Biology had hooked him in high school, the dissecting and the cells under the microscope, so he took Life Sciences at Queen’s University in Kingston: microbiology, physiology, biochemistry, statistics, which he hated. He never enrolled in the fourth year that turns the degree into a Bachelor of Science, so he left with a Bachelor of Arts in a science. Summers he worked. He guarded pools and taught swimming, and broke both bones in his lower left leg on the diving board the summer after grade twelve. He boxed unsold books at the returns desk of the University of Toronto bookstore. He worked as an orderly in the local hospital, lifting men, taking the midnight shift in the emergency room, learning to catheterize a patient.
Religion held him after the science let go. He enrolled in a theology master’s at Queen’s, since Canada writes no separation of church and state into its constitution and its public universities keep theology colleges. He studied the problem of evil, why men feel they must account for the bad things that happen, and worked toward the process theodicy of Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) and David Ray Griffin (1939-2022) under Pamela Dickey Young. He took a second, one-year theology master’s while his wife, Marcia, finished her degree in education and he got the practice of writing a thesis. Then he applied to the University of Toronto to study religion as an academic subject. There he took his M.A. and, in 1995, his Ph.D., under Neil McMullin, a historian of Japanese Buddhism, and Donald Wiebe, who pressed for the study of religion as a science and against what he called the crypto-theology hiding inside the field.
Something snagged him at Toronto. The scholars of religion he read did not sound so different from the theologians he had left. World religions courses looked to him like liberal theology in other clothes, the language of tolerance and inclusion used to make a few approved ways of being religious look normal and natural. So he stopped trying to study religion and started to study the people who study it. The dissertation became his first book.
Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (Oxford, 1997) argued that religion is not found but made. Scholars had long treated it as sui generis, a thing of its own kind, standing apart from politics and economics and history, open only to its own terms. McCutcheon called that a claim with a job to do. Set religion apart, he wrote, and you lift it out of ordinary explanation and shield it from the questions put to everything else people do. His hardest target was Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a founder of the History of Religions school, along with the reverent scholarship that had grown up around Eliade while stepping around his early ties to the Romanian far right. The sui generis view, McCutcheon charged, had built the field’s object as ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct, and had built departments and jobs and journals to match. His tools came from social theory, from Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and from Jonathan Z. Smith (1938-2017), who had argued before him that there is no thing called religion waiting to be found, only a category scholars make for their own uses.
The book drew fire and praise, both loud. In the magazine First Things, Paul Griffiths took up the theological side. Others turned McCutcheon’s argument back on him, charging that he had manufactured his own object, that the sui generis discourse he attacked was a device he had assembled to make room for himself in the market of ideas. His answer was that turning his own tools on himself did not blunt them.
Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (SUNY, 2001) gave a wing of the field its slogan. The scholar of religion, on this reading, is not the guardian of the traditions he studies and not the friend of the believer. He explains religion by the means used for any other human doing, and he owes the sacred no defense. The Discipline of Religion (Routledge, 2003) turned the lens on the field itself, on its textbooks and conferences and hiring, and read religious studies as a form of governance that trains scholars and public alike in what may be said about belief. He stood in this with Smith, with Talal Asad (b. 1932), with Timothy Fitzgerald, a small camp arguing that the category, not the sacred, is the thing to study.
The argument found a face in Robert Orsi (b. 1953), then at Harvard, a historian of lived Catholic devotion. Orsi read The Discipline of Religion and called it chilling. He wrote that McCutcheon’s scholar claimed the authority and the right to make other people’s lives the objects of his scrutiny, to theorize them. McCutcheon answered in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2006 with an essay he titled from the mouth of a believer: “It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!” He set Orsi’s warm reading of Catholic devotion beside Paul Courtright’s cold psychoanalytic reading of the Hindu god Ganesha, a book that had drawn outrage from Hindus, and argued that the field hands out empathy to the Others it likes and the harder tools to the Others whose interests cut against its own. The tenderness, he wrote, was a method, and it carried costs.
McCutcheon came to the United States before he finished the degree, an instructor at the University of Tennessee from 1993 to 1996, then Southwest Missouri State from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 he took the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama, an office in Manly Hall, and held it for eighteen of the next twenty-two years, 2001 to 2009 and again 2013 to 2023. The department tripled in faculty under him and made a name in digital work and in the redesign of the degree. He edited Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, founded the Critical Categories book series, led the North American Association for the Study of Religion, and in 2005 was elected president of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion. He started the departmental blog Studying Religion in Culture, which turns the field’s questions on politics and media and higher education, and he built the REL Toolbox with the American Academy of Religion. Alabama named him University Research Professor in 2018. He became an American citizen in 2019, holding both passports. In December 2023 the International Association for the History of Religions gave him honorary life membership, among the field’s higher honors.
At six most mornings you can find him at the old golf course in Tuscaloosa with a boxer named Izzy, who runs with her friends while he stands in the parking lot and waits. New editions keep coming, a fresh Manufacturing Religion and an expanded Religion in 5 Minutes in 2026. The question under all of it has not moved since the gas station. He does not ask what religion is. He asks why people file some of what they do under that word and not the rest, who gains when the filing holds, and what follows once it does.
Notes
The opening scene is built from McCutcheon’s own account in the “Backstory” interview on his department blog. He describes the gas station his parents owned and operated, the family living on the lot, pumping gas at the “ding ding” of the drive hose, his father’s oil-change, muffler, and tire work in the back, Port Colborne on the north shore of Lake Erie with Pennsylvania visible across the water, and the canal used by lakers to bypass Niagara Falls: Backstory interview. The bay, grease, and mechanical texture of a family filling station are self-evident to the setting and are not separately linked.
The same interview supplies the phrases and details about “closing the hatch and riding out the storm,” the low MCAT score and skipped classes, high school biology, the Life Sciences B.A. without the fourth year, lifeguarding, the diving-board leg injury, the University of Toronto bookstore returns desk, and hospital orderly work, including midnight emergency-room shifts and catheterizing patients. These are McCutcheon’s own details, lightly reworded.
The two theology master’s degrees at Queen’s, the problem-of-evil focus, and the move to Toronto for the academic study of religion also come from that interview. This is a correction worth noting. The draft you sent has him doing both his master’s and doctorate at Toronto. His master’s work, including the 1987 process-theodicy thesis under Pamela Dickey Young, was at Queen’s. Only the M.A. and Ph.D. were at Toronto. His CV confirms the thesis and lists two doctoral supervisors, Neil McMullin and Donald Wiebe, not McMullin alone: McCutcheon CV. Wiebe’s critique of “crypto-theology” is well known in the field.
His wife Marcia, their boxer Izzy, and the 6 a.m. golf-course routine come from the same interview.
The account of Manufacturing Religion, including its targets in Mircea Eliade, the History of Religions school, world-religions textbooks, and the sui generis understanding of religion, as well as the charge that religion had been treated as “ahistoric, apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct,” is drawn from Oxford University Press and bookseller descriptions: Oxford University Press and Google Books. The connection between Eliade and the Romanian far right is well established in the scholarship on Eliade.
Paul Griffiths’s review appeared in *First Things* in March 1998: First Things. The reflexivity countercharge, that McCutcheon had “manufactured” his own object, is Bryan Rennie’s. McCutcheon’s reply, that applying the critique to himself does not weaken it, appears here: Academia.edu.
The exchange with Robert Orsi, including Orsi’s description of McCutcheon’s position as “chilling” and the line about the scholar’s “authority and the right to make the lives of others the objects of his or her scrutiny,” is reported on the Wikipedia entries for both McCutcheon and Orsi: Russell T. McCutcheon and Robert Orsi. One caveat deserves checking before publication. The word “chilling” appears to move in both directions in the exchange, with McCutcheon turning it back on Orsi. If you want the attribution airtight, check the primary texts. McCutcheon’s 2006 *JAAR* essay, its full title, and the Orsi-Courtright comparison come from the article record and abstract: Journal of the American Academy of Religion. The book Orsi was defending is Between Heaven and Earth (2005). The Courtright book is his psychoanalytic study of Ganesha, which drew real threats, a detail that could be developed if you want to sharpen the stakes.
The career facts, including Tennessee, Southwest Missouri State, the eighteen-year Alabama chairmanship across two stints, the tripling of the faculty, his appointment as University Research Professor in 2018, U.S. citizenship in 2019, IAHR honorary life membership in December 2023, the Manly Hall office, editorship of *Method & Theory in the Study of Religion*, presidency of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion in 2005, the department blog, the REL Toolbox, and the 2026 reissues, come from his University of Alabama department page and the Wikipedia entry: University of Alabama and Wikipedia.
Turner Against McCutcheon’s Furniture
Russell McCutcheon is the study of religion’s great anti-essentialist. He denies that religion names a thing of its own kind. He treats it as a category scholars posit and then mistake for a natural object. Stephen Turner (b. 1951) is the anti-essentialist about the tools you pick up to say so. Put the two men in one room and a question forms. Does McCutcheon spend against religion an essence he keeps for his own apparatus?
Turner’s case sits in The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions (Polity, 1994). Social theory leans on collective nouns. Practice, culture, tradition, paradigm, ideology, discourse. Each names something taken to be shared, tacit, and the same across many people, a common possession that different heads carry alike. Turner finds a fatal difficulty in the picture. If the thing is one thing, held in common, then it has to get into all those heads, and no one supplies a credible account of how one object passes intact from person to person. What you observe is many people behaving in similar ways. What theorists add is a single hidden object underneath the similarity, posited as its common cause. Strip out the assumed sameness and the shared practice falls back into habit, and habit is individual, acquired by each person along a separate path. He runs the charge from Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) forward, and marks Bourdieu’s talk of dispositions “reproduced” in new members as the wish stated without the means.
Now read McCutcheon’s shelf of tools through that lens. His signature object is the discourse on sui generis religion. Discourse in his usage is a Foucauldian collective object, the kind of shared, patterned, hidden something that Turner puts on trial. Around it stand the others he leans on without pause: the field, the discipline, ideology, the liberal humanistic tradition. Each names a similarity across many scholars and then treats the similarity as evidence of one underlying thing they all carry. McCutcheon says of religion that there is no essence behind the word, only a posited category taken for real. Turner says the same of discourse, of the field, of tradition. The demystifier’s second-order vocabulary is first-order essentialism moved up one floor.
Watch his verbs. Classification, in his prose, produces. The category does work. The discourse manufactures. Religious studies manages, polices, disciplines. Turner’s flat reply is that categories do nothing. Persons do things, sometimes with words in hand. Hand a classification its own agency and you have performed the reification that Manufacturing Religion set out to expose, this time on the analyst’s side of the desk. McCutcheon caught the field granting religion a life of its own. His own sentences grant that life to the discourse.
He has a move here, and it deserves a fair hearing. He might answer that his collective nouns are shorthand, that he is a nominalist about discourse too, that the discourse on sui generis religion names a run of similar sentences in similar books and nothing hidden beneath them. Turner presses the fork. Thin the object down to a pile of similar texts and it loses the explanatory bite McCutcheon needs from it. A pile of similar sentences builds no departments, manufactures no object, disciplines no dissent. To carry that weight the discourse has to be a shared cause standing behind the writers and steering them, and the shared cause is the essence Turner denies exists. Keep discourse thin and honest and the critique goes quiet. Keep it thick enough to explain and the old essentialism rides back in.
Credit what McCutcheon gets right on Turner’s terms, because he gets more than most of the field. The Discipline of Religion is his attempt to say how the sameness gets produced. Textbooks, hiring lines, conference programs, the training of graduate students, the socialization of the new scholar into what the department rewards. That is the anti-essentialist virtue in action. Instead of resting on a discourse that floats free and reproduces on its own, he points to institutions and the separate paths along which each new scholar picks up a similar set of habits. On that ground he stands beside Turner. There is no single shared essence of religion. There are people trained, one at a time, into resembling one another. His institutional account is the transmission story a Turnerian asks for.
The residue is in his verbs, not his research. Having replaced the shared object with many separate acquisitions in his account of how scholars are made, he keeps narrating the outcome as though the discourse were the actor and the scholars its vehicles. He has the better story already written and reaches past it for the reified one out of habit and for the punch it lands.
So the ledger reads short and lopsided. McCutcheon is Turner’s ally against the essence of religion, and half his ally on transmission, since his own institutional turn does the work Turner demands. He remains an essentialist in his grammar, in the sentences where the category rises up and manages people. Rewrite those sentences to put persons back where the collective nouns now stand, and most of his argument survives, because the institutions can carry it. What does not survive the rewrite is the image at the center of his rhetoric, the discourse that manufactures, the category that disciplines. Turner takes that image away and hands back a room full of separately trained people who write alike. McCutcheon, of all readers, has the least standing to want it back.
Turner and McCutcheon’s Collective Nouns
Stephen Turner sets one test for any concept that names a shared thing. Show how the same thing gets from one person into another. A practice, a tradition, an ideology, a discourse: each comes offered as a common possession, one object carried alike in many heads. Turner asks for the transmission and finds it missing. What sits in front of us is a crowd of people behaving in similar ways. What the theorist adds is a single hidden object below the crowd, named as the cause of the resemblance. Take away the assumed sameness and the shared object dissolves into habits, and habits belong to persons, one at a time, each picked up by its own route. The Social Theory of Practices (Polity, 1994) runs this against the line from Durkheim forward and leaves the collective nouns with nothing standing behind them.
McCutcheon runs the same test on religion and passes it. Religion, he holds, is no shared essence waiting under the world’s rites. It is a word, reached for by particular people, in particular rooms, to sort some human conduct into a protected box. Strip the assumed essence and you have scattered doings that scholars grouped and then took for a natural kind. This is Turner’s argument in another key, and McCutcheon presses it hard.
Then he builds his own account, and the account runs on collective nouns of the sort Turner voids. The discourse on sui generis religion. The field. The discipline. Ideology. The liberal humanistic tradition. Each names a resemblance among many scholars and then treats the resemblance as proof of one thing they all hold. He denies religion the standing of a shared object and grants that standing, without pause, to the discourse. He is a nominalist about the thing he studies and a realist about the words he studies it with.
His grammar tells on him. Classification produces. The category does work. The discourse manufactures its object. Religious studies manages and disciplines the public. Turner’s flat correction is that a category does nothing. People do things, and sometimes they use words while they do them. Give the classification its own verbs and you have staged the reification McCutcheon spent a career exposing, now with the analyst holding the strings. He caught the field lending religion a life of its own. His sentences lend that life to the discourse.
The reply is open to him, and it closes on him. He can say the collective nouns are shorthand, that his discourse is a run of similar sentences in similar books and nothing hidden below them. Grant that, and the nouns go quiet. A run of similar sentences builds no departments and manufactures no object and trains no one, since a bare resemblance reaches no further than the pages that show it. To make the discourse do the work he assigns it, he has to seat a shared cause behind the writers, steering their hands. That shared cause is the essence Turner denies. Thin the discourse to something honest and it explains nothing. Thicken it enough to explain and it is the hidden object he refused religion.
The way out is a rewrite, and the rewrite lies within his means. Wherever a category rises up and acts, put the people back. Scholars trained in similar seminars, rewarded for similar moves, hiring others who make those moves, each arriving at a like habit along a separate path. Say that, and the resemblance among scholars needs no shared object underneath it, no more than religion did. His charge against the field holds under the rewrite, because trained people can carry it. What falls away is the figure at the center of his prose, the discourse that manufactures and the category that disciplines. Turner takes the acting noun away and hands back a room of separately trained people who write alike. McCutcheon, who took that object away from everyone else, has the least ground to ask for his own back.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, the relentless, deconstructive scholarship of scholar of religion Russell McCutcheon serves as a cold, empirical verification of how groups manufacture ideology to secure local institutional dominance.
McCutcheon, a leading figure in the critical study of religion and author of Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia and The Discipline of Religion, argues that “religion” is not an innate, interior human experience or an objective feature of reality. Instead, he asserts that the very concept of religion is a political tool devised by interested actors to classify, control, and authorize specific social arrangements. By labeling certain practices as “sacred” or “apolitical,” groups insulate their preferred values from public contestation, thereby protecting their economic and structural power.
Mearsheimer’s framework in The Great Delusion cuts directly through standard academic debates, revealing that McCutcheon is describing the exact operational logic of tribal survival.
First, McCutcheon argues that ideological categories are manufactured by specific historical actors to advance their own authority. If Mearsheimer is right, this is human nature operating at its most fundamental level. Mearsheimer notes that humans are tribal creatures who possess a powerful drive to organize into cohesive units to navigate a dangerous, anarchic world. To maintain internal solidarity and outcompete rivals, a tribe must build a robust, shared worldview during the long childhood of its members. McCutcheon’s work unmasks the mechanics of this process. The invention of sacred categories is not a benign intellectual exercise; it is the precise device the tribe uses to enforce value infusions, police its borders, and consolidate its resource base.
Second, McCutcheon’s critique of the “sui generis” argument—the claim that religion is a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own terms, separate from politics and economics—directly targets the same intellectual error that Mearsheimer identifies in political liberalism. McCutcheon demonstrates that liberal academics and institutional leaders use the concept of an autonomous, private sphere of “religion” to mask real, material struggles for power and state dominance.
Under Mearsheimer’s lens, this aligns with the core thesis of The Great Delusion. Liberalism falsely claims to offer a neutral, universal framework where distinct individuals can peacefully coexist by relegating their deep-seated convictions to the private realm. McCutcheon proves that this neutrality is an illusion. The creation of a “private sphere” is itself a highly political, protective strategy deployed by the dominant managerial tribe to disarm competing groups and secure its own administrative hegemony.
Finally, McCutcheon targets the academic establishment itself, showing how scholars of religion use their specialized status to maintain institutional turf, capture funding, and assert cultural authority.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains this behavior without needing to rely on a theory of unique personal corruption. Academics do not operate outside the gravity of human nature as detached, individual truth-seekers. They belong to distinct subcultural tribes with their own local value infusions, status hierarchies, and survival imperatives. When scholars defend the autonomy of their field, they act like any other defensive coalition protecting its territory from external rivals in an uncertain environment.
If Mearsheimer is right, McCutcheon’s work is a devastating analysis of how human groups use language and classification as weapons of survival. Humans are not looking for universal, abstract truths; they are looking for functional myths to bind their collective together and maintain leverage over outsiders. McCutcheon exposes the raw, political engine behind our most cherished cultural concepts, showing that every claim to a neutral or universal order is simply a tribe trying to rule.
If David Pinsof is right, the aggressive, relentless critique of the study of religion advanced by Russell McCutcheon presents a fascinating case of an intellectual who correctly diagnoses the hidden strategic logic of his academic rivals, only to deploy the exact same self-serving apparatus to conquer his own corner of the university marketplace.
Across books like Manufacturing Religion and Critics Not Caretakers, McCutcheon argues that traditional scholars of religion commit a profound, systemic error. By treating religion as an inner, mysterious, or sacred experience, they separate it from the dirty realities of politics and economics. McCutcheon claims this framing is a historical misunderstanding that masks how religious talk is used to authorize social hierarchies. To his followers, his work is a fearless, clear-eyed intervention that strips away illusions and repositions the scholar as a critical analyst of ideology rather than a protective caretaker of faith.
A Pinsofian analysis applies McCutcheon’s own functionalist critique directly back to him. The theologians and traditional scholars McCutcheon attacks did not invent the idea of the “sacred” because they suffered from a conceptual brain-fart or misread historical data. Protecting the idea of a unique, inner spiritual experience is a highly rational, self-serving strategy. It provides religious institutions and sympathetic academics with a high-status shield, allowing them to guard their authority, secure departmental funding, and preserve their prestige against secular critics. They understand their incentives perfectly.
By exposing this theological strategy, McCutcheon creates his own elite mission statement. Asserting that religion is merely a rhetorical tool used to manufacture social power is not a neutral, disinterested scientific breakthrough. It is a highly effective weapon used to clear out academic rivals and claim dominant territory within the university hierarchy. His framework provides secular, critical theorists with an ideal platform to signal immense intellectual superiority over both the religious public and traditional scholars, treating their opponents’ foundational ideas as mere expressions of false consciousness or strategic deception.
McCutcheon did not discover an objective, non-ideological formula to rescue the study of religion from confusion. He executed a brilliant, combative academic strategy, converting the unmasking of others into high-status academic currency. His work functions as an exceptionally functional lever to secure a dominant, high-prestige position—anchored by a long tenure as a prominent professor and administrator at the University of Alabama—proving that exposing how your rivals play the game of power is one of the best ways to win it.
