A Genealogical Critique of the Turn to the Sacred

The turn to the sacred in recent scholarship in religious studies marks a rejection of secular modes of critique characteristic of the last several generations of scholarship. To understand this rejection, it is necessary to return to the history of religious studies scholarship in twentieth century. The “sacred” came to signify during this period the universal core of what all religions shared and thus what religious studies scholars studied, especially those called phenomenologists of religion. Born out of a simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, desire to both grasp what it was like to experience the world as a religious person and to categorize the various manifestations of religion around the world, phenomenology of religion marked the beginning of the study of religion as an enterprise that could potentially be distinct from Christian theology in the Western academy. Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade represent these two impulses in phenomenology of religion. When these thinkers came under critique by a rising generation of scholars who wanted to establish the study of religion as a more rigorous and critical enterprise, the language of the sacred was a primary target. J. Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln, and Russell McCutcheon argued (albeit from different theoretical vantage points) that the sacred was an “essentializing” language that ignored social, political, and historical context. Notably thinkers like Otto and Eliade were also criticized for the potential for their theories to support right-wing and fascistic forms of politics that claimed the sacred as the grounds of their authority.

The influence of these critiques has been widespread in the academy, even resulting in the creation of a separate scholarly society—the North American Academy for the Study of Religion—to pursue what it claims is a more authentic version of critique than those who remain persuaded that the sacred names something real in the world. In recent years, however, this ostensibly “secular” study of religion, which rejects the language of the sacred, has come under strain. The turn to religion in the wider humanities, no doubt due to the seeming bankruptcy of late capitalism and looming climate catastrophe, has led to a renewed interest in what the language of the sacred can offer scholars invested in challenging the global status quo. Drawing on sources from postcolonial, decolonial, Black studies, Queer theory, and other fields that push the boundaries of traditional disciplinary demarcations, scholars have begun to reconsider the interruptive power of the sacred in a world that seems to have been exhausted by colonial plunder and its accompanying neoliberal ideology.

Two examples of this recent turn include Barbara Sostaita’s Sanctuary Everywhere: The Fugitive Sacred in the Sonoran Desert (2024) and An Yountae’s The Coloniality of the Secular (2023). Both of these books challenge the now-dominant paradigm that rejects the language of the sacred. They attempt to carve out a space for the sacred that is not “conservative,” i.e., that treats it as a static, universal, and anti-progressive force. Neither of them engages deeply with the tradition of the sacred/profane binary as it has been constructed in the field of religious studies. There is a clear value to this move. Rather than becoming bogged down in decades long debates about how to, or how not to, define the sacred and the problems inherent in either move, they open up ways of theorizing the sacred that challenges the status quo and the laws that undergird it. One can see this especially in Sostaita’s book where the “sacred” and “sanctuary” mark out places outside the law and its enforcers (in this case ICE). These points of sanctuary do not suggest that a different order to the world is possible, but only that resistance to the order we now inhabit is possible.

Nonetheless, their are problems with this attempt to recover the sacred as it neglects a deep engagement with the genealogy of the sacred that has shaped its use in the field. By turning to one of the earliest modern theorists of the sacred, Rudolph Otto, I make the case that for him, the sacred and profane were not distinct ontological spheres but instead part of the same onto-theological system. The sacred, or the irrational in his language, was always in need of balancing by the rational sciences of theology, or the profane. But both were fundamentally necessary, even if, in his time, religious experience of the sacred had been given insufficient attention. Mircea Eliade would further extend this framework in his taxonomy of religion which analyzed the various manifestations of the sacred across the world’s religions. The lesson this holds for our present is that interpolating the language of the sacred without giving an account of its history risks reinstating a theology that does not in fact challenge the status quo. Rather, it props up an order in which both the sacred and profane function as a binary within a singular hegemonic system. In this manner challenges to the “status quo” are already anticipated and thus manageable with the existing order of things. I thus suggest that the sacred is a language that should be approached with caution by scholars who seek to resuscitate in this moment.