Not Religion

In Mexico, a Christian brotherhood invites members to have a religion-free personal relationship with God and practice a particular form of born-again self-transformation. In Switzerland, a Masonic lodge pursues a peculiar blend of enlightenment philosophy and esoteric truth seeking. Both organizations cultivate ethical brotherhoods and ritualized relationships to the sacred. Both organizations also disavow "religion," sidestepping the divisions in time, space, and personhood that liberal modes of governance typically draw between public and private, as well as civic and conscientious.

In Not Religion, Graham Hill asks why members of these organizations pursue relationships with God, the sacred, and the spiritual while also rejecting the religious character of their engagements. He investigates, and sometimes participates in, the organizational activities of both groups with a view to understanding their respective attempts to bridge civic-conscience divides and pursue everyday life-enchanting practices of self-transformation. Hill finds, in both organizations, reflexive, experimental orientations to language—of very different sorts— animating both types of practice.

Not Religion probes the curious features that the two organizations share despite all the ways in which they differ, examining why these vaguely theistic, mundane-sacralizing, everyday life-enchanting organizations distance themselves, their practices, and their beliefs from the category of "religion."

In the series Religious Engagement in Democratic Politics