For and against “religious innovation”

The six essays that comprise this forum probe the utility, value, and analytic pay-off of the concept of innovation as it pertains to religion and spirituality–which, for the purposes of this essay, I shall treat as synonymous. Each offers illuminating and important insights into historical processes, contemporary developments, and theoretical debates. As such, I read them with great interest–along with a great deal of ambivalence. There is, the authors make evident, much to be gained from employing the notion of innovation to analyze, interpret, and explain religious or spiritual phenomena. But there is, equally, much that is potentially lost, ignored, or suppressed. Indeed, these are two sides of the same (late modern) coin. The risks, then, are real–and so in this concluding essay I aim to bring them to light. First–the case for “religious innovation.” The most compelling argument is what I’ll call the argument from agency. Vaidyanathan, Martí, Winston, and Sun all advance some version of this. Talk of “spiritual innovation” foregrounds the agentic actor; individuals are not mere religious dopes, passively adapting, responding, or merely surviving, but rather creatively and imaginatively innovating. As Martí puts it, “innovators act intentionally.” So, when Vaidyanathan contends that “religious innovation” promises certain “analytical advantages” I take him to mean, chiefly, that it enables us to see the active, contingent, and dynamic aspects of religious change–of the way exogenous pressures force religious actors to innovate new political configurations and traditions, as Winston documents, or of the way endogenous concerns for legitimacy motivate spiritual and institutional innovations, as Martí theorizes. In pondering this, I am reminded of the late Peter Berger’s (1979) classic text, The Heretical Imperative, in which he argued, “It may be an oversimplification to say that the history of Christian theology in the modern West has been the drama of this confrontation with the heretical imperative, but it is probably not too much of an oversimplification.” Berger could be construed here as contending that the history of Christianity is, in effect, a history of religious innovation–of agentic, legitimacy-seeking actors, confronting the exogenous and endogenous pressures of modernization. On this view, Martin Luther is the paradigmatic religious innovator. Whether or not Berger would approve of this interpretation, Vaidyanathan is surely right that the heuristic implied by innovation–by foregrounding agentic actors while eschewing what Hans Joas calls “dangerous nouns of process”–brings to light adaptations, modalities, and forms that we might otherwise miss. Moreover, as both Sun and Winston remind us, these omissions would be particularly unwelcome given that it is often–though by no means always–the powerless and marginalized who are compelled to innovate in their quest to challenge the status quo. Spiritual innovation is often a force for progressive change because, as Martí observes, it is manifestly “disruptive.” For some, then, disruption is the point. But the intriguing thing about innovation in religion is that, even when it’s motivated by traditionalism or institutional repair, it may still engender disruption. The case of Indonesian Confucianism, as Sun demonstrates, is a particularly striking example of this. But so, too, is the history of American religion. As Winston shows, in striving to stay true to the Protestant principle, the American founders unwittingly laid the foundations for immense “spiritual innovation”–from the democratization of religion to the ascension of female spiritual leaders. Finally, while none of the authors make this argument explicitly, one might extrapolate from their claims a tacit corollary of the argument from agency, which seems especially pertinent in our nascent age of AI. In a world where the line separating humans from machines is increasingly blurry, a scholarly interest in “religious innovation” perhaps preserves a principled commitment to the meaning-making and magnificently imperfect human, which unlike its AI counterpart, is a locus of both spiritual agency and moral consciousness. And yet, for all its analytic advantages, the concept of innovation is far from an innocent descriptor, void of historical, cultural, or moral impedimenta. Of course, many of the authors acknowledge this. Vaidyanathan notes that talk of “innovation” vis-à-vis religious and spiritual life can seem “an imposition of contemporary economic language onto practices that ought to be understood on very different terms.” And he also acknowledges the prevalence of a “pro-innovation bias, which assumes newness is good and implies progress.” Likewise, Sun wisely asks us to consider whose interests are served when we speak of “religious innovation.” These authors are clearly not naïve to the risks attending this concept. But I think something more must be said for the case against “religious innovation.” What has not been acknowledged is that innovation is a thick concept. Thick concepts fuse the descriptive and the normative, such that these two components cannot be analytically separated. What is more, as Gabriel Abend remarks, thick concepts “have a special kind of relation to the societies in which they exist.” Accordingly, in calling innovation a thick concept, I am saying that the concept is deeply implicated in the social structural and cultural realities of (late) modernity. As such, “innovation” is profoundly modern in multiple senses; as a number of the authors note, the contemporary concept was born in the twentieth century–a product of the industrial revolution and the civilizational obsession with technology it unleashed. But the concept is equally a sort of keyword for late modern life, encapsulating within itself an entire cultural zeitgeist. Hartmut Rosa has argued that a defining feature of modernity is social acceleration–that is, not only does modernity engender constant social change, but the pace of change constantly speeds up. One driver of this, as Kucinskas insightfully elucidates, is social-structural: as capitalist logic has relentlessly expanded its reach, the outcome has been, not mere creative destruction, but “spiritual and religious creative destruction.” Thus, in our increasingly “unbundled” landscape, where the borders separating the religious, economic, and technological spheres have collapsed, to be a “religious entrepreneur” is increasingly to be, well, an entrepreneur, while digital technology is touted in Silicon Valley as a source of “religious salvation,” as Aupers disturbingly reports. What is clear, then, is that much “spiritual innovation” in late modernity is born of the accelerationist pressures of capitalism. However, a second source of social acceleration is cultural: in modernity, the good life, argues Rosa, is the “fulfilled life, i.e., a life that is rich in experiences and developed capacities.” It follows that the cultural logic of modernity is to seek, in the words of Friedrich Ancillon, “change for the sake of change.” This explains why, as Vaidyanathan puts it, “Calling something innovative is a mark of praiseworthiness.” Whether we realize it or not, the social, structural, and cultural forces that we in the twenty-first century inhabit are, ceteris paribus, for change, and thus, for innovation. With this in mind, let us return to that question raised by Sun: “For whom does the religious innovation take place?” One answer to this query is: he or she calling it ‘religious innovation’! I noted above that we could think of Martin Luther as the paradigmatic “religious innovator,” but I strongly suspect the Pope would disagree. And this reveals something critical about this concept: it belongs to the vocabulary of the victor, of those who, regardless of their degree of reflexivity, ineluctably lend tacit approval to the changes they describe. Such is the character of thick concepts. Of course, none of this serves as a knock-down argument against “religious innovation.” But it does force us to reckon with the potential consequences of employing this term. When Winston refers to AI as “one of the largest and potentially revolutionary spiritual innovations ever,” or when Aupers calls “AI animism” a “religious innovation,” our scholarly gaze brims with interesting–dare I say, innovative!–insights. Indeed, the same can be said of the application of religious language to non-religious phenomena, like when the market is analogized to a God, or when CEOs are interpreted as modern-day prophets. Yet we must not fool ourselves into thinking all that this amounts to is an “analytical advantage.” Religious and spiritual creative destruction, no less than creative destruction proper, leaves many victims in its wake–victims whose voices are silenced when interpreted under the approbative banner of innovation. Vaidyanathan is therefore absolutely correct when he contends that “innovation”–much like late modernity itself–is “inherently normative.” To use this term is already to take a stand; so if we’re going to do it, we should at least do it with our eyes open wide.