Manufacturing Religion

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Marking the thirtieth anniversary of its original publication, Russell T. McCutcheon revisits an influential critique of traditional scholarship on religion, given that, in his estimation, little has changed in the field despite the progress often said to have been made by recent generations of scholars. This second edition, which retains but updates much of the first, adds new chapters referencing more recent literature to support the argument that claiming their object of study to be unique or self-caused has been the cornerstone of the field—providing a foundation that, ironically, isolated and now endangers it. Prominent among the sites still surveyed are the History of Religions as a discipline; the work of Mircea Eliade, perhaps the foremost representative of this still common approach; ongoing debates over Eliade’s life and politics; contemporary textbooks on world religions; and even the practical utility of such claims when it comes to far broader issues of representation and governance—all sites where we find the oft-repeated bromide that religion is a special case requiring special tools, one that defies explanation and which must, instead, be carefully interpreted for its deep meaning and timeless value. Analyzing the ideological effects of the sui generis claim, Manufacturing Religion demonstrates how it is still being used to constitute a particular sort of object, one said to be ahistoric, apolitical, personal, fetishized, and sacrosanct—all claims that not only helped to establish publicly funded college departments but also to justify for the wider public a variety of geo-political actions.</jats:p>