2020 Volume 19 Pages 60-69
In the area of religious studies, by the end of the twentieth century, critical views of the “Western-Christian” concept of religion had become obvious. However, criticism of the classical concepts and theories of religious studies has made the debate over religion elusive. How to talk about religion after criticism of the concept of religion remains an ongoing challenge.
Given these concerns, this paper uses the narrative “XX is not a religion” that appears repeatedly in the history of religion in modern and contemporary Japan as a “non-religious” narrative and presents it as an important issue in the sociology of religion.
The hypothesis of this paper is as follows: “Non-religious” narratives have created the territory of “the (non-)religious” as a structural void in religious discourses. From this point of view, this paper outlines the genealogy of “non-religious” narratives from pre-war Japan to the post-war period.
Such “non-religious” narratives can be linked to the recent trend of criticism of the concept of religion in current religious studies and are a matter of “non-Western” modernity as well as Japanese modernity. This paper also discusses the implications on the sociology of religion of thinking about Christianity and Shintoism at the same time in Japan.
