Panel: MINORITY, INEQUALITY, AND THE POLITICS OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY



555.1 - FROM MINORITY TO MINOR: GENEALOGY, POSTIDENTITY, AND BECOMING IN RELIGION

AUTHORS:
Ernst-Auga U. (Humboldt-University of Berlin ~ Berlin ~ Germany)
Text:
This paper develops a genealogy of the "minor" in relation to religion, tracing a shift from "minority" as a juridico-political and demographic category toward "minor" as a postidentity, critical, and transformative mode of theorizing religion. In European and global debates on religion and (in)equalities, religious diversity is predominantly addressed through minority frameworks structured by rights, recognition, and inclusion. While such approaches respond to concrete forms of exclusion, they often remain embedded in governance regimes that stabilize religion as a bounded identity and reproduce epistemic hierarchies within pluralist orders. Against this background, I mobilize "minor" in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of minor literature: a mode of articulation that deterritorializes dominant languages, links the personal and the political, and foregrounds collective processes over fixed identities. Read through queer-of-color critique (Muñoz's disidentification) and postsecular feminist analyses of embodied agency (Mahmood), "minor religion" does not name a religious minority nor a new classificatory position. Rather, it designates a practice of becoming that unsettles majoritarian norms shaping religious knowledge, secular governance, and public discourse. Methodologically, the paper combines conceptual genealogy with critical analysis of key problem-spaces structuring contemporary religious (in)equalities, including recognition politics, diversity management, and the production of "religion" as an object of knowledge. I argue that "minor religion" offers a theoretical tool within Religious Studies for rethinking diversity beyond identity-centered paradigms and for articulating alternative scholarly and theological imaginaries attentive to power, inequality, and becoming in plural religious landscapes.