{"id":196914,"date":"2026-06-30T19:18:55","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T03:18:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196914"},"modified":"2026-07-01T05:55:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T13:55:23","slug":"religion-scholar-russell-mccutcheon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196914","title":{"rendered":"Religion Scholar Russell McCutcheon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Russell McCutcheon<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Biology had hooked him in high school, the dissecting and the cells under the microscope, so he took Life Sciences at Queen’s University<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (1897-2000) and David Ray Griffin<\/a> (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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (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<\/a> (1926-1984) and Pierre Bourdieu<\/a> (1930-2002) and from Jonathan Z. Smith<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

The book drew fire and praise, both loud. In the magazine First Things, Paul Griffiths<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> (b. 1932), with Timothy Fitzgerald, a small camp arguing that the category, not the sacred, is the thing to study.<\/p>\n

The argument found a face in Robert Orsi<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n

McCutcheon came to the United States before he finished the degree, an instructor at the University of Tennessee<\/a> from 1993 to 1996, then Southwest Missouri State<\/a> from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 he took the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama<\/a>, 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. The bay, grease, and mechanical texture of a family filling station are self-evident to the setting and are not separately linked.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Wiebe’s critique of “crypto-theology” is well known in the field.<\/p>\n

His wife Marcia, their boxer Izzy, and the 6 a.m. golf-course routine come from the same interview.<\/p>\n

The account of Manufacturing Religion<\/i>, 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<\/a> and Google Books<\/a>. The connection between Eliade and the Romanian far right is well established in the scholarship on Eliade.<\/p>\n

Paul Griffiths’s review appeared in *First Things* in March 1998: First Things<\/a>. 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Robert Orsi<\/a>. 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<\/a>. The book Orsi was defending is Between Heaven and Earth<\/i> (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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> and Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

McCutcheon’s Position in the Field<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pierre Bourdieu reads a field as a game with stakes. Positions in it are set by the distribution of a capital specific to the game. In the academic study of religion that capital is recognition, the right to say what counts as good work and which objects deserve it. Players hold more or less of it, and where a man stands in the distribution shapes the moves open to him. Holders of the dominant capital play to conserve it. Those short of it play to change the rules, to mark down the reigning kind of worth and float a rival kind on which their own holdings rise. Bourdieu calls the first strategy orthodoxy and the second heterodoxy, and he treats the stance a scholar takes and the position he occupies as one fact seen twice.
\nRead McCutcheon into that space. When he enters, the dominant capital in religious studies belongs to the caretakers. Their worth is empathy, rapport, the guardianship of the sacred, the warm reading of the believer, the belletristic and theological lineage that runs down from Eliade. Standing among them earns the field’s soft rewards, the name for depth and reverence and understanding from the inside. McCutcheon holds little of that capital and shows no wish to earn it. He plays the other strategy. He calls the caretaker’s empathy a method with costs, calls the sacred a posit, and reaches for a rival capital, the capital of theory and rigor and the analyst who will not be moved. Critics Not Caretakers is the banner, and Bourdieu reads a banner as a bid. The slogan stakes a claim within the field more than it reports a discovery about it, a claim that raises the worth of what McCutcheon has and lowers the worth of what the dominant hold.
\nThen the trajectory. The man came up in a gas station on Lake Erie, took a science degree, learned to dissect and to count. He carries no elite humanist pedigree, no seminary polish, no chair at an old and gilded school. In the caretaker’s field those are marks of low standing. Bourdieu’s move is to watch the low standing turned into distinction. The science habitus, the specimen under glass, the refusal of reverence, becomes a claim to a harder virtue than the belletrist can offer. Marginality turns into vantage. The outsider sees the doxa the insiders cannot, because no one ever trained him to find it holy. The dissecting boy grows into the scholar who dissects the category, and the disposition and the position fit each other.
\nThe refusal is the strategy’s sharpest edge. Bourdieu watches intellectual fields reward the show of wanting nothing. Symbolic capital flows to the man who seems to have renounced the warm rewards, who studies the believer without love and says so plainly. McCutcheon’s coldness reads, on this frame, as the accumulation of a purer capital, the capital of not being fooled. The less he appears to want the caretaker’s prestige, the more of the theorist’s prestige he banks. His disinterest is an interest with a longer horizon.
\nThe reflexive turn is where the frame bites, and where he half-invited it, since he built on Bourdieu himself. In Homo Academicus Bourdieu holds that the analyst must turn the tools on his own position, that the scholar who objectifies the field sits inside the field he objectifies. McCutcheon asks the discipline to see its own work as a play of interests and positions. Bourdieu asks the same of McCutcheon. Reflexivity binds the critic too.
\nBryan Rennie already ran the move. In “Manufacturing McCutcheon” he argued that McCutcheon assembled the very target of his critique, the sui generis discourse, to work the market and consolidate his place in it. McCutcheon answered that turning his critique on himself leaves it standing. He is right, and the reply misses what the frame does. A stance’s position in the field leaves its truth untouched, and the sui generis critique might hold even as it pays. The frame leaves the claim’s truth alone. It explains the claim’s shape, why this stance, from this man, at this hour, against these holders of capital. To say the position-taking is legible as a position-taking takes nothing from its content. It adds the account of its force.
\nThe field kept score in his favor, in both currencies. He took the chair at Alabama and held it eighteen years, hiring, building, tripling the faculty, academic power in its most literal form. He edited Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and named what method meant. He founded a book series that named the legitimate objects. He led the North American Association for the Study of Religion, the heterodox pole set against the older establishment, an institutionalized second field with its own capital and its own consecration, where his holdings run dominant. The insurgent did not leave the game. He built a rival province and became its center, and the establishment he attacked handed him an honorary life membership near the end. The rebel against the caretakers turned caretaker of the critics.
\nCritics Not Caretakers looks, on Bourdieu’s frame, less like a finding about the field and more like a strong opening move within it, played by a man whose trajectory armed him for that move and no other. The science boy from the gas station could not out-caretake the caretakers, so he changed the stakes and won on the ground he chose. None of this shows the critique wrong. Bourdieu keeps out of the business of right and wrong. He tells you where a man stands when he speaks, and why the words, true or not, raise his standing. McCutcheon told the field its object was a bid for position. The field’s own theorist reads Critics Not Caretakers the same way.<\/p>\n

Turner Against McCutcheon’s Furniture<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a> (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?
\nTurner’s case sits in The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions<\/em><\/a> (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 \u00c9mile Durkheim (1858-1917) forward, and marks Bourdieu’s talk of dispositions “reproduced” in new members as the wish stated without the means.
\nNow 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.
\nWatch 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.
\nHe 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.
\nCredit 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.
\nThe 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.
\nSo 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.<\/p>\n

Turner and McCutcheon’s Collective Nouns<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.
\nMcCutcheon 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.
\nThen 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.
\nHis 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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe 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.<\/p>\n

The Undeceived<\/strong><\/p>\n

The hospital keeps a thin crew after midnight, and one of the men on it is a science student who has not yet found his subject. He lifts the patients who cannot lift themselves. He runs a catheter when the nurse is three rooms away. In the emergency bay under the flat white light he learns what a body is when the visitors have gone home. It is tissue. It fails along known lines. A man arrives sure that something waits for him on the far side, and the boy who wheels him takes no position on that, because he has seen the chart. Later Russell McCutcheon will make a career of the thing he learns on those nights, which is that the story laid over the body and the body are two different objects, and that most people cannot tell which one they are holding.
\nErnest Becker (1924-1974) argued that every culture hands its members a way to feel they have earned a place that death cannot cancel. The way is a hero system. Inside it a man knows what counts as a life well spent, and he spends his measuring up. The system runs on a sacred value, a coin that buys significance. The trouble Becker did not stress, and the one worth pressing here, is that the great sacred words are shared across the systems while the coin buys a different heroism in each. Two men can both die for honesty and die for opposite things.
\nTake McCutcheon’s own coin. He calls it honesty, and by it he means the refusal to be comforted. The honest man, on his account, never grants the sacred. He names the made thing as made. He watches the category “religion” get built out of ordinary acts of sorting and he declines to bow to the result. Critics Not Caretakers is the title and the creed. The scholar owes the believer no protection and owes himself no consolation. When McCutcheon writes that the caretaker’s warmth is a method with costs, he is not scoring a small point. He is defending the value his whole life runs on. To flinch, to let the sacred be real for a page, is to become the man on the gurney who cannot tell the story from the flesh.
\nThat meaning of honesty holds only inside his system. Carry the word out and watch it change.
\nThe homicide detective prizes honesty and means the fact that outlasts the alibi. He works toward a confession, a truth pulled from a man who did not want to give it, and the body on the table is his ally, since it will not lie for the killer. Honesty is extraction. It ends a case.
\nThe hospice chaplain prizes honesty and means telling a dying woman the truth about her weeks while she builds the meaning she will die inside. For the chaplain honesty and comfort keep house together. He will not deceive her about the tumor, and he will not strip her of the God she is walking toward. To him McCutcheon’s honesty is cruelty wearing a lab coat.
\nThe yeshiva man prizes honesty and means faithfulness to the argument and to the text that carries it. He spends his days in machloket, the honest quarrel, two scholars going at a line of Talmud with everything they have. His honesty digs deeper into the tradition. It never once considers dissolving it. He would find the phrase “the category Torah” not clever but blind, the sentence of a man who has mistaken the outside of the house for the house.
\nThe close-up magician prizes honesty and means the code, never claim a real power, tell them plainly it is a trick. Here he and McCutcheon nearly shake hands, both men saying the thing is made and saying so out loud. Then they part. The magician makes the deception and hands you the pleasure of it. McCutcheon takes the pleasure back. The magician’s honesty protects the wonder by fencing it. McCutcheon’s honesty ends the wonder as a matter of hygiene.
\nOne word, five heroisms, and the man in each is ready to stake his significance on it.
\nNow the systems that stand against McCutcheon’s, and there is a crowd of them.
\nThe caretaker runs the oldest one in his field. Robert Orsi (b. 1953) kneels beside his Catholics and counts it his work to enter the world they live in, to render the saint on the mantel and the vow at the shrine as they are lived from the inside. His hero is the scholar as witness and companion. His honesty is fidelity to the believer’s own account of the believer’s own life. When Orsi reads The Discipline of Religion he calls it chilling and writes that McCutcheon’s scholar claims the authority and the right to make other people’s lives the objects of his scrutiny, to theorize them. To Orsi this is a moral wrong done to people who never consented to the redescription. To McCutcheon, Orsi commits an intellectual cowardice he named in a subtitle, the cost of saving others from themselves. The same act, two verdicts, because each man is defending the coin of a different system.
\nThe believer runs a fiercer one still. McCutcheon lifted an essay title from the mouth of a believer told what her faith really is underneath: “It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!” Hear it from her side. A scholar has arrived and explained her God as a social sorting, and she answers that the explanation is the lie and the naming of it a sin. Her hero system grants her a place in a story older than her body, and the man who dissolves the story has not freed her. He has tried to kill the part of her that outlasts the gurney.
\nAnd there is the tribal and traditional system, which deserves its name here because it opposes his most cleanly and because serious people live inside it. The man in it earns significance as a faithful link in a chain, a Jew who keeps the covenant his great-grandfather kept, a son who carries a name forward, one who belongs to a people and a land and will answer for both. His honesty is loyalty. To see through the sacred story of his people is not honesty to him. It is treason, the act of a man who has cut his own line and calls the cutting clarity. Set this system beside McCutcheon’s and the collision is total. What he calls the courage to name a made thing, the traditionalist calls the vanity of a man who mistook forgetting his ancestors for seeing past them.
\nMcCutcheon is too smart to miss that he is inside a system too. When critics tell him he manufactured his own object to raise his own standing, he answers that the charge, turned on him, leaves his case standing. He is right about the case and beside the point about the man. Becker’s question is not whether the sui generis critique is true. It is what the critic gets from being the critic. And what McCutcheon gets is the oldest thing on offer, a way to face the emergency bay without the fear that broke the men on the gurneys. His immortality project is to die undeceived. To have handled the body as a body and the sacred as a made thing and never once been the mark. The dignity of the man who was not fooled is a consolation like any other. It is only a colder one, and he has mistaken the cold for proof that it is not a consolation at all.
\nHere is what the ledger cannot price. The chaplain’s dying woman gets the thing that carries her out. The yeshiva man gets the house he lives in and hands to his sons. Even Orsi’s Catholics get the saint who hears them. McCutcheon, guarding his coin, gets none of it, and calls the emptiness honesty. He built a hero system whose one rule is to grant no hero system its due, and it works, and it gives him precisely what he denies the believer, a way to feel significant in the white light after midnight. The undeceived man has a god. Its name is the refusal of gods, and he tends it the way the woman tends hers, and he will die inside it certain, as she is certain, that his was the one that was real.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer\u2019s framework in The Great Delusion cuts directly through standard academic debates, revealing that McCutcheon is describing the exact operational logic of tribal survival.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Second, McCutcheon’s critique of the “sui generis” argument\u2014the claim that religion is a unique phenomenon that must be understood on its own terms, separate from politics and economics\u2014directly 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.<\/p>\n

Under Mearsheimer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Mearsheimer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

If Mearsheimer is right, McCutcheon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014anchored by a long tenure as a prominent professor and administrator at the University of Alabama\u2014proving that exposing how your rivals play the game of power is one of the best ways to win it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=196914"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196914\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196938,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196914\/revisions\/196938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=196914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=196914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=196914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}