Enchanted

Spent the day at Yale with three Lang students, to hear the latter half of a conference devoted to Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, our efforts to wade through which I've described twice before. (In fact, we all got up before dawn to catch a train, so it was a very long day.) What did we conclude? Religious studies rocks! Some of the most interesting observations were made by José Casanova, a comparative historical sociologist of religion until recently a colleague at New School, and the best paper was by Courtney Bender, a religionist from Columbia (below the pic from her website). But it was also a little bittersweet, since many - including other people on Courtney's panel - couldn't even understand what she was saying, and so unwittingly confirmed her argument.

What was her argument? That Taylor's thesis that we live in a "a secular age" in which, even for religious believers, the nonexistence of God is thinkable, rests on a general disenchantment of western culture which is asserted rather than demonstrated. Yes, many elites started sounding secular in the 19th century, but Taylor pays no attention to how ideas circulate, and just assumed that the masses followed these ideas. In fact, even the elites didn't behave as he asserted: the 19th century in America was full of religious experimentation and novelty, some of it understanding itself as "spirituality" rather than "religion" but clearly not disenchanted. And yet, Courtney argued, if you just assume that the world had been disenchanted by then (by the scientific revolutions and the Enlightenment), you can't take these developments seriously, and will see them as subjective, individual and vestigial - no longer part of the culture, no longer a living faith. And yet, they deserve to be studied as religion. Further, the more we learn about lived religion before disenchantment is alleged to have happened, the more we see that religion in the supposedly secularizing and disenchanted ages is as much continuous with it as a break from it.

Others at the conference confirmed the validity of her argument by refusing to take it seriously. One guy asked if spiritualism really should count as "enchanted," since it involved ghosts, surely a sign of disenchantment. Taylor himself insisted that, as "reenchantment," it is "compensation for the loss of enchantment by other means." But if disenchantment didn't happen in the requisite way, no reenchantment is necessary! And experiencing the dead as not dead doesn't sound like disenchantment to me.

It may sound like a merely verbal disagreement, but it really gets at the heart of the matter - and maps on to a frustration us religious studies folks experience routinely in "the academy," where people who've never really thought seriously about religion and are somehow unaware of the continuing vitality of religion all around them, blithely assume that if religion's not dead already, it must surely be dying soon! Religious formations are certainly changed by modern developments, but reports of the death of religion are definitely premature. Where Courtney described a research project for tracing and testing these changes, the philosophers, political scientists and literature people at the conference proved so enamored of the idea of living in a secular age that they weren't able to see why further research was necessary.

This could be merely irritating - the clash of déformations professionelles which happens all over academe. But to me it's more. It's not just contemporary religious phenomena that are dismissed as vestigial. The people who live these religious and spiritual practices are dismissed, too, and dismissed without even an attempt to understand them.

José put his finger on part of the problem in a gentle critique of Taylor's book (which he otherwise praised extravagantly): the dominant "stadial" view of history (an ugly term Taylor uses for views that see history as moving irrevocably through stages). The "stadial" assumptions of secularized folks in Europe and elites in America who dismiss religion in the west as vestigial will soon have to cope with what happens as modernization occurs, and occurs differently, in non-Western cultures. (In Japan, for instance, modernization has not brought a decline in religious belief and practice.) Their secular ages won't be like the European post-Christian one, and the idea that there is a single narrative will fall apart.

Some in academe have got the point already, from considering religion in the United States. Don't ask me if I think the rest will get the point, even when the rest of the world modernizes in multiple not necessarily secularizing ways. I'm afraid their certainty, and their dogmatic willingness to dismiss masses of people as deluded, looks to me like the kinds of religious behavior we all wish would be secularized away! Why does it matter to them so much?

(I'm not claiming it doesn't matter to me, indeed I'm struggling with facing my internalized secularization theorist, as I've reported a few times already. Struggling, but it feels good. It feels like seeing more, seeing the humanity of more people, which is surely always a good thing. But don't ask me what it says about religious realities... !)