12 - William James in Late Capitalism: Our Religion of the Status Quo

Summary

“[T]ell me how you classify and I'll tell you who you are.”

(Barthes 1972, 175)

According to William James and the intellectual tradition of which he is a part, institutional religion is the “excrescence” (James 2004, 432) built on religious experience. While much has been written on “religious experience,” there is less critical scholarship on the idea of “institutional religion” or “organized religion.” However, both sets of terms belong together in a pervasive and broadly persuasive contemporary discourse—a discourse that, ironically, informs those very religious traditions it was designed in part to criticize—and a consideration of one should involve a consideration of the other. In this essay I will explain how this contemporary discourse operates and how it belongs to a dominant folk theory of religion that dovetails well with consumerism under late capitalism. In sum, I will argue that the experience/institution distinction is a building block of a modern, domesticated religion of the status quo, which has incarnations in both modern “spirituality,” as well as liberal forms of Christianity. I do not claim that all uses of “religious experience” and “institutional religion” advance late capitalism, but that they are easily and often aligned with late capitalist norms.