Beyond the Secular-Religious: Ethical Lives of Soka Gakkai Buddhists in Japan

What is it for something to be a religion? What does it mean for something to be religious? What lies outside the bounds of the secular-religious? I seek to situate these questions in scholarly literature that critically examine the globalized categorical constructions of secularity-religion and their imbrications (e.g., Asad 1986; McCutcheon 1997; Masuzawa 2005; Fitzgerald 2000; 2011; Taylor 2007; Josephson 2012; Maxey 2014; Horii 2018; 2021). Based on a one-year ethnographic fieldwork with Japan’s largest lay Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai and its members, I suggest that, counter-intuitively, the conceptual assumption of Soka Gakkai as a religion (shūkyō) must give way to an analysis from the ground-up where ethical and moral practices constitute the bulk of their activities. The reexamination of this religious assumption suggests that novel ways in understanding the movement and its members are possible when we move beyond the religious-secular dichotomy, toward the lens of ethical and moral lives that the anthropology of morality has recently highlighted (e.g., Howell 1997; Laidlaw 2002; 2014; 2023; Heintz 2009; Faubion 2011; Fassin 2012; 2014; Robbins 2013; Keane 2016; Mattingly and Throop 2018). I argue further that this shift not only resolves uneasy categorical ambiguities but further advances our decolonizing conceptual tools in thinking of other movements that defy the conventional secular-religious categories.