Be careful what you wish for: Postmodernism

The most concise definition of postmodernism could be ‘cultural turn plus social constructionism amplified to the power of ten' (cf. Figure 14). In brief, postmodernism

entails the rejection of all previous modernist tenets and assumptions.

where some saw aberrations or challenges within the modern project, postmodernism saw unavoidable and logical consequences: colonialism; fascism/ communism and industrially planned genocide; the destruction of the natural environment in the name of unfettered progress and technology; the North's exploitation of the South; the horrors of modern warfare, compounded by methodical application of the very science and technology initially meant to liberate humanity; and the spiritual poverty and alienation of mass consumerism.

Wenzel 2009: 174

From this perspective, for instance, it becomes possible to assert that Darwin and evolutionary biology have been active partners in crime with Victorian capitalism to create the basis for imperialism and Nazi genocide - which is, in Harry Frankfurt's terms, bullshit (Richards 2013; cf. Desmond and Moore 2009). Consequently, postmodernism ‘rejects any claim of absolute truth', as truth is seen as a top-down coercion aimed at ‘impos[ing] a “master voice” or “meta-narrative” ' (Wenzel 2009: 175). As advanced by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), reality is indistinguishable from fiction and, thanks to the current mass media production of cultural contents, fiction provides a more compelling reality than reality itself. Science, as a way to obtain reliable knowledge about the social and the natural world, loses its prestigious status and becomes just another way to manage and impose social power in hierarchical settings - if not the longa manus of political domination itself.

With regard to religion itself, postmodernism entailed an apparent reinforcement of secularism, while fostering a decline of traditional religions and a sharp rise of spirituality and regressive fundamentalism (Wenzel 2009; Copson 2017). In the wake of the collapse of the Cold War geopolitical system, neoconservative attacks against post-war social justice, welfare state, state intervention in economics, and Enlightenment values gained momentum, replicating the right-wing attacks against modernity and modernization during the Interwar period (Antonio 2000: 47). Thus, postmodernism, delegitimizing facts and relying on interpretations alone, has created the basis for a new right-wing and populist ‘reactionary tribalism' in which ethnic origins are retrieved and reinvented as a bulwark against the hegemony and homogeneity of globalization. With the dissolution of modernist epistemological and normative criteria, a ‘total critique of modernity' is envisaged and implemented by appealing once again to twentieth-century far-right or conservative, anti-democratic thinkers (Antonio 2000).

Within this new framework, if academic and scientific ‘objectivity' is merely the result of societal negotiation and power dynamics, the assumption of objective truth achievable by the scholar according to precise, empirical protocols of enquiry is refuted (Strenski 2015: 165, 167). Meanwhile, ‘the goal of religious studies should be the appreciation of the distinctiveness of each religion [...]. The believer is the equal of the scholar' (Segal 2006: 158). The aim of the new postmodernist RS is a ‘comparison of [all] narratives', independent from their degree of truth (Wenzel 2009: 175). In the study of myths and religions, for instance, one might identify a ‘polyvalenced discourse' between ‘self-affirming fantastical and [...] self-negating' elements which, in turn, reveal ‘interpretive possibilities that challenge and exceed interpretive, hegemonic frames, past and present' (Taylor 2008: 95). Discourse here is the keyword. Originally conceived by French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a RS discourse, as Kocku von Stuckrad defines it, is the result of ‘communicative structures that organize knowledge in a given community' and which ‘establish, stabilize and legitimize systems of meaning and provide collectively shared orders of knowledge in an institutionalized social ensemble' (von Stuckrad 2014: 11; cf. Ambasciano 2016b). In a discursive study of religion, religion and science are reduced to ‘the societal organization of knowledge' about those themes (von Stuckrad 2014: 14). But, as Ivan Strenski aptly summarized, ‘if all discourse is “constructed” with some human purpose in mind, the job of the religious studies scholar is to “deconstruct” theoretical discourse to get behind the agendas lurking there.

If no ‘scientific approach' can ever be capable of gathering universal knowledge which can be considered valid, compelling, reliable and convincing, and if everything depends on the availability of resources and various kinds of institutional, political or financial capitals to invest in order to assert one's own discursive power over others, then, ‘the ambitions of the founders of the study of religion to do general cross-cultural comparison should be abandoned' in favour of specific, local, explorations by scholars engaged in the emic sharing of non-scientific knowledge (Strenski 2015: 167). Even though the scientific ambitions of the comparative science of religion had already been crushed by the advent of the HoR, a fully fledged postmodern approach entails the end of any study of religion(s) as we know it or, at the very least, the fractionation of the new RS in a multitude of loosely communicating clusters of research.