Rezza Prasetyo Setiawan
Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada
Religions co-constitute parts of the Earth’s history and they continue to influence the current state of the world. Religions exist not only in thoughts or words, but also in actions, all of which reverberate far beyond human perception and understanding. Therefore, the significant role of religions in co-constituting reality should not be limited only as a means to explain the current state of marginalization and oppression but also as a force of change against injustice. This article will reframe the Marxist understanding of interreligious engagement that is based upon a conventional materialism within the neo-materialist paradigm to expand the understanding of interreligious engagement as entanglements of material-discursive struggle against capitalist homogenization.
Religions within Capitalism and Marxism
Here, the plural term “religions” is intended to highlight that homogenization is one of the challenges that capitalism brings to the originally-diverse Earth. King has explored how religions in India were put inside a homogenized label of “Hindu” which reflects the paradigms not of the colonized but of the colonizers. Recently, Northcott has also shown how the religiously-entangled agricultural practices in Bali were ignored in favor of the modern industrial mode of agriculture. Homogenization is simultaneously the mode and the result of modern capitalist oppression. Therefore, promoting diversity is both the weapon and the objective in the struggle against capitalist homogenization.
Against capitalism, Marxism prevails as the most prominent ideological contender. However, Marxist philosophies have been notoriously known for their pessimism toward religions. Through this perspective, religions should be abolished as they are mere myths that cloud the eyes of the proletariat from the reality of class struggle.
Bakunin poetically wrote in his book, “the ideal … is but a flower, whose root lies in the material condition of existence”. Marx also framed religions through this materialist lens. The diverse religions take root and bloom upon the bloodied soil of economic oppression. They are not only insignificant for the class struggle against capitalism, they are also seen as parts of the enemy. As a result, religious diversity and interreligious engagement garner less attention and occupy a lesser level of significance. Religious diversity is viewed largely as the side-effects of different socio-economic material conditions. Religious diversity and interreligious engagement are only the collision of different worldviews without any real implication. Religions are only ideational, so interreligious engagements are also ideational.
However, materialism itself has been lacking in its capability to tackle the growing intersectional issues of economy, social, politics, and environment. The accelerating development of technology that sprung from sciences based on materialist paradigms could not seem to cure these problems. Ironically, they seem to have accelerated the environmental destruction instead. That is because materiality is only one aspect of the problem.
Neo-Materialist Reading of Religious Diversity
Anthropocentrism in conventional materialism is one of the main causes of socio-ecological degradation. Conventional materialism treats matter as inert and passive objects, ignoring their active agency in co-producing reality. As Merchant highlights in her book, The Death of Nature, this paradigm frames matter, including the Earth, as passive objects incapable of their own agency. As a dead object to use and as wilderness to conquer, it is up to humans what to do with Earth’s mineral deposits, forests, oceans, and other ecosystems because the Earth is in chaos and rational humans are here to sort this problem. Exploitation emerges from the false assumption that matter is without agency.
Neo-materialism assumes that matter and meaning are inseparable. Barad has argued in their book that matter does not precede meaning and vice versa, because matter and meaning are in co-constitutive entanglements. It means each entity only exists in relation with other entities, and therefore meaning is produced through these relationships. There is no separation between the material and the ideal, nature and culture, etc. These separations are exploitative and are further manifested through the primacy of language (discourse) and words over matter in the representationalist philosophical traditions. Instead, Barad argues that both the material and the discursive aspects of phenomena perceived by humans are actually a single manifestation of a reality constituted through the entanglement of various and countless agential matters.
Applied to religions, this means that religions should not—and cannot—be treated by separating its material and discursive aspects. Barad coined the neologism “material-discursive” to emphasize this inseparability between matter and meaning, between the material and the discursive aspects. Hence, the social, politics, and religions are actually both the flower and the soil in Bakunin’s metaphor, because both are inseparable and one does not precede the other. There is neither primacy of the material over the discourse as in the conventional materialist traditions, nor primacy of the discourse over the material as in the structuralist and representationalist traditions.
Therefore, the Marxist view of religions as a hegemonic tool that promotes injustice is not shared by the neo-materialist paradigm. A religion is a particular way of existing that results from the entanglement of material-discursive entities. Here, religion is a certain way of co-constituting material reality.
If a religion is material-discursive, then religious diversity is the diversity of many material-discursive realities. Here, interreligious engagements can be understood more clearly as the meeting of the various co-constitutions of realities. Interreligious engagements demonstrate the entanglements among people from different material-discursive, collaborative constitution of realities. The plurality of worlds that meet through interreligious engagements critically responds to the problem of homogenization brought by capitalism.
Interreligious entanglement as a struggle against capitalism
By understanding religions as the various ways of co-constituting realities, the hegemonic pattern of religions that functions in favor of oppression can be viewed critically as a force of silencing the agencies of other entities and their specific material-discursive traditions. Capitalism works by marginalizing, silencing and denying the agency of entities. The Earth is framed as a dead rock, ready to be used and exploited; non-capitalist traditions are viewed as primitive and backward, needing modern capitalist developments; the diverse religious traditions are bagged under overgeneralizing labels and names. Therefore, embracing and promoting diversity is the preferable way of fighting the homogenizing force of capitalism.
Religions do not act as an opiate that diverts the struggle against oppression and exploitation. Interreligious entanglements are ways to emphasize the significance of religious diversity and collaboration among those various material-discursive worlds. Through the awareness of interreligious material-discursive entanglements, the struggle against capitalist homogenization and silencing of agencies becomes a collaborative struggle because the existence of one community is always entangled with other communities.
To summarize, a neo-materialist reinterpretation shifts the Marxist understanding of interreligious engagements from a mere engagement of worldviews without any material significance against capitalist injustice to material-discursive entanglements of various worlds that collaborate as a struggle against the hegemonic and oppressive homogenization and silencing of agencies under capitalism.
