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Manufacturing McCutcheon: The failure of understanding in the academic study of religion

It is evident from my title that I apply Russell McCutcheon's own critique to him. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere (Rennie, forthcoming) that he has manufactured the whole 'sui generis discourse on religion' to exercise his own influence on the market, to consolidate his own position in the arena of discourse. McCutcheon has not denied this but responded that applying his critique to him does not weaken it However, this misses my current point. It is not merely his critique of the discourse on sui generis religion that is manufactured but the very person of Russell McCutcheon. There is a copious volume of recent literature concerning the social construction of the human self. This weakens McCutcheon's critique of the significance of 'nonhistorical', socially constructed, manufactured categories, such as he takes both religion and the 'sui generis discourse' to be. First, persons are socially constructed entities. They are 'manufactured', but they are not thereby insignificant. 'Reality* is increasingly recognised as a social construct, not to mention 'history* and 'nature', and their importance is difficult to deny. Second, it reminds us that, if one recognises the significance of one's own subjective experience, one cannot deny the significance of the experience of others, despite problems of access. Even granted that persons and cultures are themselves reciprocally produced and producing congeries of socially manufactured entities, one of the multiple ends of the study of religion is understanding.* Obviously this requires an understanding of the socially constructed entities of those cultures and not their rejection as non-historical, non-natural, and thus reducible without remainder to purely 'historical' and 'natural' explanations. One might be not at all surprised if McCutcheon were to respond that the business of a rigorous and critical religious studies is not some ineffectual and uncertain humanistic aim like 'understanding* but a more hard-edged and wissenschaftliche goal like 'explanation'. McCutcheon employs the term understanding himself, yet he is obviously suspicious of it. He says that: