Naomi Goldenberg - Public Voice

Originally Posted November 2007

Last Thursday, November 8, I chaired a session titled "Challenges of Religion in a Globalized World" at a small conference about "Women, Religion and Development" in Ottawa. The four speakers on the panel were not scholars of religious studies. They were either sociological researchers or professionals in the field of international development. In their presentations, "religion" as a category was not problematized. Each speaker assumed the following: 1. religion is something very good for men, women and children; 2. criticism of any aspect of any religion is either ethnocentric, or disrespectful, or racist, or colonialist, or neo-liberal or all five. 3. any negative qualities attributed to religion originate from "culture" which distorts basic religious goodness; and 5. that "the media" are responsible for much ignorance about religion because what is reported is simplistic and does not sufficiently acknowledge #1. Unfortunately, in my role as chair I had no time to raise any questions about these assumptions. No one in the audience did either.

One panelist mentioned a comment that a woman in Afghanistan made in the context of a discussion about religion. "Don't be so politically correct," the Afghani woman said. "Please don't defend the systems we ourselves want to change." Neither the panelist nor anyone else at the conference referred again to that remark or seemed to notice how it conflicted with the assumptions that grounded their discourse.

I have three hopes for the type of interventions that religious studies scholars could make in public discussions of the sort I am reporting here: 1. that complexities regarding the categories of "religion" and "culture" be pointed out clearly and often; 2. that critical inquiry regarding religious traditions be encouraged and 3. that the common equation of religion with goodness be disturbed. I don't want to disappoint the anonymous woman in Afghanistan whose words I find so meaningful.