Revisiting the Religious Revival in Development: A Critique of Philip Fountain (abstract)

Philip Fountain has written a challenging and, in places, thoughtful chapter that touches on a set of issues that currently challenge actors across a wide spectrum of differing institutions and world views. Fountain’s beginning and ending points are his reflections on the ‘discovery’ of religion by development communities. He argues that overgeneralised – I would even say sloppy – definitions of religion are commonplace. He goes on to deduce that what underlies many treatments of ‘religion’ is ‘a default conceptualisation – substantivist, essentialised, ahistorical and universal’. He makes an important argument: that where the vast and complex worlds of religion are involved, simplistic categorisations are misleading and laden with great political baggage. I agree entirely with the first point, but am far less convinced that nefarious politics are at work to the degree he suggests in his efforts to conceptualise the overlap among development and faith worlds. I would argue, in fact, that simplistic characterisations of the vast and complex worlds of international development are as similarly fraught as broad generalisations regarding religion. Fountain’s chapter is weakest, in my view, in its characterisations of development. He calls for a critical examination of ‘secular development’ but gives few indications as to what, precisely, that would involve.(…