Hijacked : a critical treatment of the public rhetoric of good and bad religion Whether intentionally or not much of our public discourse on religion involves a subtle but incredibly powerful distinction between good and bad religion. The implications of these labeling practices are far reaching indeed for such judgments manifest in terms such as fundamentalist radical and extremist words that are often the gauge by which governments worldwide determine everything from the parameters of religious freedom to what constitutes an act of terrorism to whether certain groups receive legal protections. Conversely it is often surprising to see how different groups that may otherwise better typify the extremist profile remain unscathed by punitive governmental or social measures because of their pre existing social popularity or perceived normalcy. This volume argues that public inquiry into religion is guided by unspoken value judgments which are themselves the products of rarely discussed political interests. Put differently is quite easy for scholars to revoke or impart religious credentials to a group depending on whether that groups members behave as outside commentators think religious people should Introduction: And what kind of society does that create Russell T. McCutcheon Good Muslim bad Muslim : neo orientalism and the study of religion Aaron W. Hughes Religious studies and the jargon of authenticity Jason Ā. Josephson Storm Toward a critique of postsecular rhetoric Naomi R. Goldenberg The political utility of the past : the case of Greek fire walking rituals Vaia Touna Privatized publics and scholarly silos : gender religion and their theoretical fault Lines K. Merinda Simmons Whats religious freedom got to do with it On the niqab affair in Canadian politics Matt Sheedy The strange and familiar spiritual journey of Reza Aslan Martha Smith Roberts The journalist ethnographer religious diversity and the euphemisation of social relations Carmen Becker Scopophilia and the manufacture of good religion Leslie Dorrough Smith Naturalizing the transnational capitalist class : Reza Aslans believer and the ideological reproduction of an emerging social formation Craig Prentiss Authentic religion or how to be a good citizen Steffen Führding Bad religion on the university campus : political correctness and the future of the insider outsider problem in the study of religion Adrian Hermann Stefan Priester Studying religion in a post truth world Stephanie Gripentrog The good the bad and the non religion : the good bad rhetoric in non religion studies Christopher R. Cotter The campus as a safe space A sociology of knowledge perspective on the new student protests David Kaldewey What teaching new religions tells us about the discourse on good and bad religion David G. Robertson Unintentionally constructing good and bad religions in teaching classical European social theories at a Japanese university Mitsutoshi Horii Good and bad legitimate and illegitimate religion in education Wanda Alberts Benign religion as normal religion Suzanne Owen.