Heresy Today: Religious Exclusion in the Modern World

Dear Colleagues,

Heresy is often considered to be a thing of the past and of marginal relevance to the study of religion. Yet those who have studied empirical cases of “heresy” find that the label is embedded in the social fabric of religious life. Far from being marginal, empirical investigations have revealed how the definition of a heresy often shapes mainstream understandings of orthodoxy in many different traditions. Such definitional dynamics are not restricted to a forgotten past of the medieval Inquisition or even the 17^th century Salem witch trials. The label of heresy has popped up in modern Christianities into the 2000s. And it is not now—indeed, never was—solely applied amongst Christians. We can see hereticization in many modern religious forms of life, although the label may mean something different and have a greater global impact today than it did in the past. Modern social, political, economic, and epistemological conditions interplay significantly with hereticization. For instance, when hereticization is backed by the force, and on the model, of law in the era of the modern state, it has resulted in social exclusions with far-reaching ramifications.

Despite this importance, there is very little empirical mapping and theorization of modern heresies. As Foucault famously showed, those who are excluded from a system best define what a system is. But Foucault’s and related studies of exclusion have hardly been operationalized in the study of religion when it comes to the modern era. Calls for a comprehensive heresiology, or social scientific study of heresy, have remained largely unanswered, especially those that problematize the relation of the sacred and the excluded, or the co-creation of heresy and orthodoxy (e.g. Berger 1979; Zito 1983; Henderson 1998; Berlinerblau 2001). However, there is now a critical mass of scholarship on modern heresy, not just in Christianity, but also in Islam (e.g. Qadir 2015), Judaism (e.g. Biale 2002), Hinduism (e.g. O’Flaherty 1971), etc., which can be collected and studied together. Such studies can show how modern definitions of heresy have created an epistemic regime in which the label of heresy acquires different and often more widespread significance than in the past. In other cases, religiously grounded exclusion might be very severe but is not labeled heresy, and so has a different trajectory that must also be mapped. Indeed, far more evidence is needed about modern cases of exclusion and heresy from around the world, including from a comparative perspective, and about how hereticization in these instances is rooted in postcolonial, imperial, or capitalist epistemes.

This Special Issue assumes that heresy as a label is a modern, widespread, significant, and shifting category in religious traditions around the world. It seeks to map how the label is applied and represented, and to define what the label might mean for the study of religious lives and discourses as well as societies and polities. To this end, the issue will compile studies of heresy from around the world in modern times and in Abrahamic as well as other religious traditions. The issue is concerned with identifying how heresy operates under conditions of modernity roughly since the 19^th century CE on. Empirical research on previously unreported case studies of the application of a label of heresy are welcome, as are reports about modern continuities of older cases. Equally welcome are comparative analyses of hereticization. The issue also invites theorizations of heresy in sociological, political, anthropological, philosophical, or literary genres, as well as analyses of religiously grounded exclusion that escape the label of heresy.

References:

Berger, Peter L. 1979. The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. New York: Anchor.

Berlinerblau, Jacques. 2001. Toward a sociology of heresy, orthodoxy, and doxa. History of Religions 40: 327-51.

Biale, David. 2002. Historical Heresies and Modern Jewish Identity. Jewish Social Studies 8: 112–32.

Henderson, John. 1998. The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucianism, Islamic, Jewish and Early Christian Patterns. Albany: State University of New York Press.

O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. 1971. The Origin of Heresy in Hindu Mythology. History of Religions 10: 271-333.

Qadir, Ali. 2015. When heterodoxy becomes heresy: Using Bourdieu's concept of doxa to describe state-sanctioned exclusion in Pakistan. Sociology of Religion 76: 155-76.

Zito, George V. 1983. Toward a sociology of heresy. Sociology of Religion 44: 123-30.

Prof. Dr. Ali Qadir
Guest Editor

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• Heresy
• sociology of religion
• anthropology of religion
• exclusion
• heterodoxy