Fraud Accusations, the Exception, and Mormonism: Thoughts on the Study of Religion

My newsfeed trumpeted this morning that the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will not have to appear before a British magistrate to face fraud charges. From this news item surge issues that are analytically interesting, even without my having read the court documents. 

I am fascinated with the idea that religious preaching and organization could potentially be judged by transactional standards of fraud, or not. In either case, we see a division of the social world into different segments where divergent standards of evaluation ostensibly hold. 

I could write at length about notions of economic transactions that underly any accusation of fraud.  They already presume social relationships should operate in a certain way and see a relationship between information and money such that the information should have some verifiable connection between empirical reality and words (claims, statements, and such).  

This is already not a normal human way of engaging other people. It presumes words are governed by representation, i.e. that empirical connection between that which is beyond language and the language itself, and it sees the movement of money as somehow relating to, or even sealing this connection between statements and life. 

But I am more fascinated right now about the notion that classifying something as religion, even when money is involved, removes it from the standards of transactions, such that the empirical is replaced as the standard with notions of faith and belief, whatever those ultimately are. 

I say it that way because we often presume we know what faith and belief mean, but it may be that they only mean that statements pertain to the domain of religion which is somehow special. 

Their use does not remove the questions of whether the statements are empirical, or whether they should motivate giving money.  In fact, in Mormonism, statements that otherwise are from the domain of empiricist epistemology -- i.e. testing, proof, knowledge, etc. -- are commonly used.  Though ritualized, for many people, they still sound and function as if they were scientifically valid statements.  

By classifying the statements as religion, the court seems to state -- at least in my reading of press reports -- that though sounding like empirical claims, statements which trigger the giving of money cannot be held to the ordinary notions of empirical truth.  

It is tempting to focus on truth claims, nevertheless, to argue something about God, salvation, or some such.  However, I do not think that is the relevant issue.  Instead I think the point is about money.  

The court seems to be suggesting that religion is a different domain from the economic sphere, where issues of fraud are more pertinent.  It is as if money works one way in economics and, even though the issues and transactions may look the same, it works differently when the transaction is classified as religious. 

Religion operates as a kind of exception -- pace Agamben.  It ostensibly lies beyond the normal area of economic transactions.  Yet, if we do borrow at least a portion of Agamben’s thought on exceptions, then the exception itself is unstable.  Its boundaries are contestable and shifting, as is the nature of religion. 

Though religion seems to be determined by interactions with the supernatural, the divine, it may well be built by cases such as this which mark the shifting boundaries of that which is excluded and that which is included. 

Although judgements by the court are important, and indeed very interesting, there are other issues at stake  As a result, we can see the exception, religion, as being a domain caught in cross cutting issues and distinctions that are potentially contradictory.  Religion may not be something definable in practice or in concept as a single thing.  Rather it may be defined by the shifting fate of the social and legal distinctions that mark it as an exception.

Religious bodies rely on money, as well as on other gifts of time and material goods.  They also employ people and pay wages.  Often -- as in the case of Latter-day Saints -- they may also hold enterprises that are classified as economic.  

For any analysis then of religion and its place in society, it is not the nature of God, the Holy, or even things such as money, employment, charity, etc. that define something as religious or economic.  There may be no essence.  

Instead religion probably is a property of that exception that removes its monetary transactions from being taken as economic, since the economy is arguably the ideological and perhaps practical basis of our society, even though bodies classified as religious include both economic and non-economic domains.  That they can be centered in the exclusion is as good a way as any to grasp Durkheim’s idea that the sacred is that which punctuates the profane. 

Again, this is not about essence, but shifting boundaries of a socially contested, yet perhaps necessary, domain which puts somethings outside of ordinary reality and locates others within it.  

The LDS Church appears, again and again, in cases making the space of the exception, in this case within Great Britain, just as it is also doing in the US in terms of marriage law. It would be interesting to take this notion of the exception seriously and build an understanding, along with appropriate terminology, of a Church such as the LDS based on it.