Imposing On Others – Compare and Contrast

Narrating the story yourself gives you a chance to tell it like you want it.

Stephen Prothero’s recent post in the “On Faith” section of the The Washington Post accuses of condescension the  people who see all religions as different paths to a single truth — apparently those like Karen Armstrong and the Dalai Lama.  However, Prothero’s rather straight-forward claim that “religions are different” ends up assuming a few things:

1)    He assumes that religions make similar enough claims or claims about near enough the same thing that we can contrast them as religions.  This means that religions are similar… comparable… so to speak.  Right?

2)    He also assumes that as a religion professor, he is able to take an interpretive stance that allows him to analyze these differences between religions in some manner that avoids the condescension/colonialism critique that he levels against his comparativist colleagues.

Prothero mentions that those who believe that all religions lead to the same truth actually end up describing that singular truth differently.  When comparativists do this, they remake other people’s “truth” in their own image.  Hence the colonialism/condescension.

However, I think we may safely assume that the role of the religion professor pointing out differences between religions is precisely projecting onto others his idiosyncratic perception of other people’s truths and the differences between them.  No matter what “differences” Prothero comes up with (in this case, the trinity and the hajj), he is simply making the comparativist claim in reverse.  Beyond all that, we could safely assume that a Christian would understand his differences with Islam in a way that is significantly different from the way a Muslim understands his differences with Christianity.

Particularly for the Abrahamic religions and their various supersessionary logics, religions use other religious traditions to support their own claims such that other religions (their errors, stubbornness, what-have-you) become part of the colonializing religion’s terrain and self-image.  This seems not only to happen at the moments of a tradition’s inception but continuously, in iterations.

Much could be said about comparison and the problems of comparative practices in religious studies, but the assertion that “religions are different” falls prey to the selfsame critiques.

In the meantime, I highly recommend Wendy Doniger’s book that carries the most awesomest title one could imagine:  The Implied Spider.  She has some very interesting things to say about the problems of failing to differentiate (racism, for instance, that a certain color of people all hold the same traits) and for differentiating to the extreme (wherein the other becomes entirely exoticized and such that one cannot identify with them at all).

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