First published in 1997, Manufacturing Religion was a controversial book because it critiqued a widely adopted style of scholarship that presumes that religion is utterly unique, inexplicable, and therefore able only to be interpreted by privileged scholars. Claiming religion to be sui generis (or self-caused), this approach has undisclosed practical effects--institutional and geo-political--at a variety of sites, from the types of textbooks commonly used in introductory classes to the way that political events are often represented in the mass media. Russell McCutcheon documented the ubiquity of this approach and showed how harmful it was Updating its wide-ranging evidence and adding new chapters, this new edition demonstrates the impact of this critique while showing how little the field has generally moved in the past thirty years.

"a foundational book...with practical implications for how academic fields are organized, how knowledge is produced, and how liberal democracies govern... In this new edition McCutcheon confronts the curious afterlife of his own argument, a critique that has been widely cited, frequently claimed but, as he contends, rarely absorbed." - The New Books Network, May 2027