Seriously, What Does “Taking Religion Seriously” Mean?

In this essay, I argue that recent calls to take religion seriously are less about taking religion seriously and more about avoiding conflict. Thus rather than being an antidote to secular liberalism, such calls are, instead, an insidious reinscription of a secular liberal assumption, i.e., that a nonconflictual, liminal space free of power can be created. I examine this reinscription in two areas of scholarship on religion: first, works which address the political and civic challenges of American pluralism; second, works which address the difficulties of producing scholarship about persons in different historical periods and cultural contexts. Whereas in the first case, the risks of taking religion seriously are managed by a more sophisticated deployment of secular liberalism, in the second case, they are managed by the exceptional scholar who is capable of radically opening himself or herself up to the other and resisting closure and its attendant conflict.