Religious “Knowledge” as a Post-Truth Concept?

Abstract

The word “post-truth” first surfaced when Donald Trump became president of the United States back in 2016. Since then, it has gone on to have many definitions and meanings, such as “where some feel emboldened to try to bend reality to fit their opinions”, “a deliberately complicated relationship with the truth”, or the simple Oxford Dictionary one: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Though many people have taken on many angles on the post-truth subject, I have decided to focus on its relation to religion, or more specifically, religious “knowledge”, which is defined in the following way: “religion per se is created by God but religious knowledge is human-made. The sacred law is divinely created but its understanding is a human enterprise.” It seems that, almost by definition, religious “knowledge” falls under the category of post-truth, which is why I use the term loosely; “knowledge” implies “truth”, and, in fact, it might be quite the opposite. Leaning heavily on Morteza Hashemi and Amir R. Bagherpour’s A Theory of Evolution of Religious Knowledge in a Post-Revolutionary Iran: And a New Frontier for Sociology of Knowledge, I examine how various definitions of the term post-truth can play into our understanding of religious “knowledge”, focusing mainly on Islam, since it is the religion that Hashemi and Bagherpour focus on – that is not to say, of course, that these findings could not be applied to any of the other religions.