The Ideology of Religious Studies

This monograph offers a critical examination of religious studies as an academic discipline, arguing that the field operates with unexamined ideological assumptions that undermine its claim to scientific objectivity. Fitzgerald contends that religious studies perpetuates a fundamentally theological framework while masquerading as secular scholarship, thereby obscuring rather than illuminating its subject matter.

The work's central thesis challenges the discipline's foundational category of "religion" itself. Fitzgerald argues that treating religion as a universal, trans-cultural phenomenon distinct from politics, economics, or culture represents an ideological construction rooted in Western Christian theology. This categorization, he maintains, emerged from specific historical circumstances in post-Reformation Europe and was subsequently universalized through colonial expansion. By accepting religion as a natural kind requiring specialized study, religious studies inadvertently reproduces Protestant theological assumptions about the nature of faith, belief, and the sacred-secular divide.

Fitzgerald employs intellectual history to trace how the modern concept of religion developed alongside liberal political theory and capitalist economics. He demonstrates that the privatization of religion as a matter of individual belief, separate from public affairs, served particular ideological functions in Western societies. This genealogical approach reveals how academic religious studies inherited and naturalized these historically contingent distinctions. The author particularly critiques phenomenological approaches that claim to bracket questions of truth while studying religious essence, arguing that such methods smuggle in theological presuppositions under the guise of scientific neutrality.

The work engages broader debates about secularization and the academic study of human societies. Against scholars who view religious studies as a neutral, descriptive enterprise, Fitzgerald positions it as complicit in maintaining Western hegemony by imposing culturally specific categories onto non-Western societies. His critique extends to the way religious studies departments legitimize certain forms of discourse about transcendence while marginalizing others, effectively policing the boundaries of acceptable academic discussion about ultimate reality.

This intervention matters for the God debate because it questions whether academic institutions can meaningfully address theological questions without explicit ideological commitments. Fitzgerald's analysis suggests that attempts at neutral, scientific study of religion inevitably reproduce particular theological or anti-theological positions. By exposing the ideological underpinnings of religious studies, the work challenges both religious and secular scholars to acknowledge their philosophical presuppositions when engaging questions about divine reality, human nature, and the organization of knowledge itself.