Nietzsche's philosophy of religion

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Book Reviews 467 
biography. Among the many curvatures to Mutwa's life story, Chidester 
includes the anecdote, told often by Mutwa, when he witnessed two alien crea-
tures boarding a spaceship in Botswana. In the bush where the aircraft had 
landed, extraterrestrial rubbish remained. Mutwa made sure the rubbish was 
buried, explaining, "That is the African tradition" (183). Resisting the tempta-
tions such a tale offers the observer (How did the African tradition anticipate 
alien waste management?), Chidester defers judgment, arguing that Mutwa 
finds his authenticity in alien abduction; it is, perhaps, the only way he can 
counter his own abduction of tradition. Chidester's reading of Mutwa is simul-
taneously unrelenting and exonerating, critical yet cautious. "Even a fake," 
Chidester writes, "can be doing something authentic" (186). It is despite such 
reductive dichotomies of interpretation that Authentic Fakes offers a truly pro-
vocative survey of the American religious bazaar. 
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm023 Kathryn Lofton 
Advance Access publication May 17,2007 Indiana University, Bloomington 
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. By Julian Young. Cambridge 
University Press, 2006. 230 pages. $29.99. 
Nietzsche did not write "books" in the classic sense; he wrote what Roland 
Barthes called "texts," i.e. aphoristic writings which are, in Barthes's words, 
"irreducibly plural." As such, Nietzsche's writings become something of a her-
meneutical Rorschach test: Nietzsche interpretation is as much about the her-
meneutical subject as it is about the object of interpretation. Put another way: 
the kinds of reading practices one brings to the Nietzschean text will, a priori, 
determine the outcome of that reading. 
This is very much the case with the recent offering by Julian Young. In 
what he takes to be a significant re-reading of Nietzsche and a serious inter-
vention into Nietzsche criticism, especially what he constantly refers to as the 
Anglophone interpretation of Nietzsche, Young argues two things. First, contra 
(what Young again takes to be) conventional wisdom, Nietzsche was not 
an atheist but was, rather, a religious reformer. Second, Nietzsche was not, 
again, as Young assumes the scholarly consensus holds, a radical individualist. 
Rather, Nietzsche is, on Young's view, a communitarian and must be seen in 
the German Volk tradition. As Young argues, although it seems obvious that 
Nietzsche was "an 'atheist,' Murphy holds that he never was. Though atheistic 
with respect to the Christian God, Nietzsche, Murphy holds ought to be 
regarded as a religious reformer rather than an enemy of religion. Second, while 
most readings take Nietzsche to be an 'individualistic' philosopher Murphy takes 
his concern to lie, first and foremost, with community" (2, all italics Young's). 
While both of these, especially the former, are provocative theses, it is 
important to note to what contrary thesis Young takes himself to be respond-
ing. Although he does not say much about it, what he actually names as the 
468 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 
"Anglophone interpretation" to which he is responding is Walter Kaufmann's 
work, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950, 1st ed.), which 
Young describes as "enormously influential" (2). He also names Alexander 
Nehamas, whose work, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), he describes as a 
continuation of the Kaufmannian individualistic reading of Nietzsche. While 
he only cites Kaufmann a handful of times throughout the work, it is clear 
that, in many ways, the development of his thesis is largely formed in response 
to Kaufmann's work. Nehamas is cited only once at the very beginning of the 
work, and Young seems to be generally dismissive of any kind of "literary" 
reading of Nietzsche. Nowhere are the contemporary French critics such as 
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Blondel, Sarah Kofman, et al., so well known, even 
notorious, for their re-readings of Nietzsche cited, nor do their works appear 
in the rather short bibliography. 
Young also argues for a close, even intimate, relation between Nietzsche 
and Schopenhauer. In a footnote, Young makes the claim that Nietzsche con-
tinued to be influenced by Schopenhauer well into his later years: "In contrast 
to his later abuse of Wagner, however, throughout his life Nietzsche continues 
to treat Schopenhauer with great respect and, Murphy thinks, affection, treats 
him as a—as the—worthy opponent. Still in the 1886 Preface to volume II of 
Human, he honors him as 'my first and only educator'" (58). Young's overall 
point, an extension of his basic methodology, is to read Nietzsche's thought in 
light of his historical context and "influences," i.e. Schopenhauer "caused" 
Nietzsche to think certain thoughts. One could argue that the Wagner-
Schopenhauer relationship was, in fact, the reverse: Nietzsche was saddened by 
his rift with Wagner while he came to despise the metaphysics of "pity" 
(Mittleid) and nihilism of Schopenhauer. 
Young treats Nietzsche's relationship to the German Volk tradition in a 
similar manner. One of his major claims in this work is that the reason 
Nietzsche can be seen as a religious reformer rather than an atheist is, again, 
due to the fact that he celebrated the idea of the Volk and saw religion, a la 
Durkheim, as a positive force promoting social unity. So the Volk notion and 
the anti-atheism reading go hand in hand. Young's method here is historicist: 
the Volk tradition was German, Nietzsche was a German who used the term 
often, therefore the historical context caused him to think this way. Young 
offers rather scant evidence of the impact of the Volk tradition, citing only one 
source on it, and that dated from 1964. That Nietzsche could hold both a posi-
tive functionalist view of religion and be an atheist—as in Peter Berger's 
delightful phrase, "a combination of Moses and Machiavelli"—is a possibility 
that seems lost on Young. One could argue that one must be an atheist, i.e. not 
take the content of religion seriously, to be a functionalist. 
The readings of Schopenhauer and the German Volk tradition are both 
part of his overall hermeneutical strategy to locate Nietzsche within a history— 
the Epilog is subtitled "Nietzsche in history"—and read that history as funda-
mentally continuous. As he argues: "I want to conclude this book by position-
ing Nietzsche within German intellectual history . . . by showing that the views 
Book Reviews 469 
I attribute to him have a great deal in common with those of many of 
his German contemporaries who were similarly alive to, in Hölderlin's word, 
the 'destitution' of modernity... the views I attribute to Nietzsche are very 
much the views one would expect from someone with is perceptions and 
anxieties, writing at his time and in his place" (201). Context causes content. 
Nowhere does Young show any sense of Nietzsche's critique of historiographie 
methodology and Young certainly does not seem to be acquainted with the 
Nietzschean-inspired critique of the plasticity of "emplotment" so thoroughly 
analyzed by Hayden White and Gary Shapiro, among others. Young, rather, 
will offer a "straightforward" reading of, again as he himself puts it, "Nietzsche 
in history." Neither does he show any sense of either Heidegger's or Derrida's 
history of metaphysics—or the metaphysics of history—an approach which has 
dominated more up to date readings of Nietzsche. The fundamental plot, pre-
mises, structures, ideological encoding etc., of this history or of what it means 
to be "in" history are not at all addressed (to the best of my recollection, the 
notorious phrases, "gran recit," "meta-narrative," or "master narrative" do not 
appear anywhere in the entire work). Nietzsche is read quite literally, in classic 
historicist fashion, between Kant and Heidegger, into "German" history, as if 
that history were a metaphysical substance which existed objectively. 
Young describes his methodologyas "good 'philological' practice" (6) and 
claims that this is how Nietzsche read himself (in Ecce Homo). What this method 
shows, again, on Young's view, are "strong continuities" in Nietzsche's thoughts 
about religion and community. Here again, Young rushes in where others tread 
lightly. Much of Nietzsche interpretation is taken up with the issue of the relation-
ship between the "early," "middle," and "late" Nietzsche. Are they continuous or 
is there an important break? Most scholars feel there is a rather important break 
between the early and late Nietzsche, the early Nietzsche being still caught in 
(Schopenhauerian) metaphysics, whereas the later Nietzsche is often seen as radi-
cally deconstructive. It is not surprising, then, that Young focuses so much on the 
early writings. Nietzsche himself viciously critiques some of his own early works, 
especially the much celebrated The Birth of Tragedy, of which Nietzsche said, "It 
smells offensively Hegelian." Young, however, sees continuities in all of this. One 
has to ask: is this continuity born of "good philological practice" or an a priori 
commitment to a historicist theory of "influence"? Has his reading of Nietzsche 
been informed in any way by Nietzsche's strategies of reading? 
His strategy for substantiating these twin theses is to offer short readings 
of all of Nietzsche's major works in chronological order. He starts with The 
Birth of Tragedy and ends with Ecce Homo. The exposition of each work forms 
a chapter unto itself. Eleven of the thirteen chapters (plus an Introduction and 
an Epilog) of the book deal with different works by Nietzsche. While all of 
them are relatively short, the chapters on the early works are the longest and 
most detailed, whereas the later works are treated more briefly. So The Birth 
of Tragedy gets twenty pages, the Untimely Meditations twenty-four, Human-
all-too-Human thirty, whereas The Gay Science gets seventeen, Thus Spoke 
Zarathustra sixteen, Beyond Good and Evil twenty-four, On the Genealogy of 
470 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 
Morals eleven, and Twilight of the Idols gets fifteen pages. While a number 
of side issues arise, in each chapter Young is charting the development of 
Nietzsche's interrelated views on religion and the Volk. 
Barthes once said, "Tell me how you classify and I'll tell you who you are.n In 
his ground-breaking collection of studies, The New Nietzsche (MIT, 1985), David 
Allison argued that "most readers of Nietzsche have been quick to place him 
within the terms of traditional thought. . . they not only find his thought to be 
coherent and continuous with the language of traditional metaphysics, but to be 
fully circumscribed by it" (xi). This manner of reading allows the mode of 
reading itself to enjoy an unquestioned privilege. That is, the status of genres, 
their rules, the ensemble of preconceptions, the coding of discourses, the entire 
categorical schema used in the analysis and arrangement of the text is taken 
intact and "applied" to the text in question. Ergo, Allison argues: "What is at 
stake in deciding these claims [about hermeneutical strategies] is therefore con-
siderable—not merely the nature of one somewhat enigmatic thinker, Friedrich 
Nietzsche, but the viability of conventional thought itself, its own prospects of 
limitation, decline, or future" (xi). Besides being a consummately un-Nietzschean 
hermeneutics, Young's historicist reading is an amazingly conventional way of 
thinking. It transforms scholarship into the reiteration of a doxa, of a pre-estab-
lished set of ideas, categories, and assumptions upon which there is transparent 
agreement by "all right thinking men." Scholarship, then, is in service of bour-
geois culture and civilization, it is the scientific, intellectual, and academic legiti-
mation of its taxonomic principles, its norms, its values, its mores, thoughts, and 
assumptions. "Philosophy," "history," "culture," "religion," "values," and/or 
"reason," these fundamental taxons of Western ontotheology, of European civili-
zation, of what Derrida called "white mythology," and/or bourgeois culture 
remain untouched by Nietzschean criticism in Nietzsche scholarship of this kind. 
Nietzsche becomes a "philosopher," not a threat, a challenge, an alter, an Other, 
not ganz andere to that tradition. His calls for an end, a new beginning, or the 
destruction of all those categories get folded neatly into the gran recit of the 
West's own thought. Nietzsche goes mad; society, thought, culture, and religion 
all go untouched. He is now "one of us," a "right thinking man," a confirmer, 
not a critic, of our common sense. Such is the "British mode" of Nietzsche 
studies, exemplified in the Cambridge series and in this work. 
doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm024 Tim Murphy 
Advance Access publication June 11, 2007 The University of Alabama 
The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early 
Modern England. By D. Bruce Hindmarsh. Oxford University Press, 
2005. 397 pages. $110.00. 
This study provides a deeply researched survey of eighteenth-century nar-
ratives of evangelical conversions and a provocative argument for what those 
^ s 
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