Why is it so difficult to get Critical Religion into the mainstream? Reflections on Horii’s ‘Religion’ and ‘Secular’ Categories in Sociology

For converts to critical religion like me, Mitsutoshi Horii’s latest book (2021) makes satisfying reading with its optimistic vision for serious engagement across disciplines, which has been sorely lacking. While critiques of the categories “religion” and “secular” have been shaking up religious studies since the 1990s, these started largely as auto-critique by religionists reflecting on the modern Western and colonial origins of their discipline. A growing number of scholars—including Horii— have been using those insights to open up new avenues for research in various fields of area studies. Today one can hardly write about “religion” in Japan or China or India or the African continent without at least acknowledging the colonial history of the category. Yet somehow the theoretical literature on critical religion remains stuck within a disciplinary silo, poorly understood and regarded by many as a niche sub-field of religious studies. Horii’s book represents an important move to bring it into the mainstream of sociology. Horii argues that critical religion must be integrated into the wider project to decolonize sociology and the social sciences at large. His book offers several valuable contributions to the work of making this happen: introducing the problem of religion-secular categories to those outside of religious studies (chapters 1-3); relating this problem to the mainstream corpus of sociology, from the founding fathers of the social sciences (chapter 4) to contemporary theorists and university textbooks (chapter 5); proposing decolonial correctives to recent trends in sociology that have attempted to rethink the category of the secular through “secularity” (chapter 6) and “multiple secularities” (chapter 7); and finally reflecting on how to move beyond the “secular” self-identity of a discipline like Sociology, and therefore escape its colonial positionality (chapter 8). Each chapter can stand alone as an accessible short reading for undergraduate courses. The way Horii presents it, the task of deconstructing the religion-secular binary should be an intuitive extension of the decolonial projects to denaturalize boundaries of nation, race, or gender. In fact he sees the critique of religion-secular categories as a sine qua non of decoloniality—not merely as adding value to or expanding the scope of current sociological literature. He was motivated to write this book by a frustration shared by many critical religionists: that the problems with the category religion are still routinely “acknowledged but then sidestepped” (Fitzgerald 2000, 136). In