Abstrakt
The paper is a response to a Czech book by Juraj Franek, who argues that there are only two ways of theorizing religion: the "naturalistic" one, which sees religion as an illusion and explains it by reducing it to non-religious terms, and the "protectionist" one, which sees religious experience as something irreducible that can only be understood in a specific sui generis manner. Contra Franek, I show that there is a third way, one that explains religion in non-religious terms without reducing it.
The key to this kind of non-reductive explanations is the way theories react to their own limitations. A reductive explanation is one that attempts to fully subordinate reality to its own categories, refusing to accept the existence of some aspects of it that are unpredictable and cannot be reduced to rational algorithms.
A non-reductive explanation, on the other hand, is one that grants reality the right to resist full conceptual grasp by ever surprising us with its ceaseless abundance and creativity. A non-reductive explanation may explicitly thematize these unfathomable aspects of reality (Turner's conception of liminality being a classic example), or it may just implicitly grant them, mapping various social, psychological, or cognitive mechanisms without seeing these as exhaustively capturing the essence of religious phenomena (in this sense a large part of anthropological explanation of religion may be said to be implicitly non-reductive).
The non-reductive approach is dialogical, denying the hegemonic role of the Western rational discourse and seeing the study of other discourses as an opportunity for encountering other possibilities of being, and thus for reflecting the rationalistic self-delusions of modernity. In this way it questions the post-Enlightenment myth of disenchanted secularism, self-reflexively confronting us with the non-rational roots of our own (post-)modern world.