In the propenultimate meeting of "Theorizing Religion" - which is really the last real class, as Monday will be given over to reflections, and Tuesday is an optional museum exhibition visit - we talked about "religious experts."
The assigned reading was the preface to the new edition of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, which provides an update on the last decade's religious freedom legislation and jurisprudence. It also explains why Sullivan, whose frustrating experience as a "religious expert" in a court of law was the topic of the original book, no longer agrees to serve this role.
"Un-American"! Much of what scholars of religion do - whether critical, comparative or constructive - is precisely, well, adding to people's understanding of themselves... if there's no place for that in the courts, what place is there for it in the broader culture? The class was (commendably) reluctant to defend "telling people that they don't understand their own religion" - we'd rather let a hundred flowers bloom, whether we think them real flowers or illusions. While queasy about the political process, we're sympathetic to Sullivan's deference in declining the role of "religious expert."
What is the place for religious studies, then? There followed a vigorous discussion of the place of education more broadly, as it impinges on people's understanding of religion or not, starting in a case Sullivan describes about the "stealth religion" of "intelligent design" (which only one member of the class had heard of) and ending with my singing the praises of Nel Noddings' Educating for intelligent belief and unbelief, most of whose examples come from Noddings' experience as a grade school mathematics teacher. Perhaps philosophical, existential, spiritual questions arise in all areas of inquiry if we let them - an unnerving prospect in many ways. Who "lets," and how?
We ended with a discussion of an Op-Ed in today's Times by Ross Douthat called "The Return of Paganism," which seems to be a sympathetic account of changes in the sociology of American religiosity consonant with things we've been discussing. Douthat discusses a new theological book which analyzes the re-emergence of an old "religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity":
Douthat follows the author in calling it "paganism."
The assigned reading was the preface to the new edition of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, which provides an update on the last decade's religious freedom legislation and jurisprudence. It also explains why Sullivan, whose frustrating experience as a "religious expert" in a court of law was the topic of the original book, no longer agrees to serve this role.
Scholars of religion should not be testifying in free exercise and establishment clause cases (=all First Amendment religious freedom cases). We are not doing what the Federal Rules of Evidence requires of experts. We are not "helping the trier of fact." What we are doing is telling people that they don't understand their own religion. That is un-American. It is for the courts and legislatures, at the direction of the people, to sort out what religion means for law. (xxv)
"Un-American"! Much of what scholars of religion do - whether critical, comparative or constructive - is precisely, well, adding to people's understanding of themselves... if there's no place for that in the courts, what place is there for it in the broader culture? The class was (commendably) reluctant to defend "telling people that they don't understand their own religion" - we'd rather let a hundred flowers bloom, whether we think them real flowers or illusions. While queasy about the political process, we're sympathetic to Sullivan's deference in declining the role of "religious expert."
What is the place for religious studies, then? There followed a vigorous discussion of the place of education more broadly, as it impinges on people's understanding of religion or not, starting in a case Sullivan describes about the "stealth religion" of "intelligent design" (which only one member of the class had heard of) and ending with my singing the praises of Nel Noddings' Educating for intelligent belief and unbelief, most of whose examples come from Noddings' experience as a grade school mathematics teacher. Perhaps philosophical, existential, spiritual questions arise in all areas of inquiry if we let them - an unnerving prospect in many ways. Who "lets," and how?
We ended with a discussion of an Op-Ed in today's Times by Ross Douthat called "The Return of Paganism," which seems to be a sympathetic account of changes in the sociology of American religiosity consonant with things we've been discussing. Douthat discusses a new theological book which analyzes the re-emergence of an old "religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity":
that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that
God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an
external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical
experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent
world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.
Douthat follows the author in calling it "paganism."
This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in
spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of
an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what
awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea
that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we
should aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and
spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature
and happiness in the everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that
this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random,
a place where we can truly hope to be at home.
This pretty well describes the religious leanings of many in our class, and I was half-hoping students would welcome it. But while Douthat's piece mentions and is accompanied by photos of contemporary "Neo-Pagans," the piece is really trying to reinscribe an ancient Christian theological understanding of paganism as the blindness from which Christ and the Church saved us. At work in Douthat's argument is a retrograde understanding of America as Christian, and a narrow range of civilizational alternatives which would appeal only to a reactionary eurocentric convert Catholic - Christian, heretical and pagan.
This is conservative theology, not just "opinion." The piece even ends with a hyperlink suggesting these new religious forms are not harmless New Age but consort unwittingly with sinister forces: demons! The reference is hidden in a hyperlink, but is there for those with eyes to see. Theological dog whistles in the ostensibly secular New York Times! Wasn't this what so appalled Jonathan Z. Smith in our first class reading, parsing a Times Op-Ed by Billy Graham blithely asserting that Jim Jones was demonic as though this were a category all agreed on?
This is conservative theology, not just "opinion." The piece even ends with a hyperlink suggesting these new religious forms are not harmless New Age but consort unwittingly with sinister forces: demons! The reference is hidden in a hyperlink, but is there for those with eyes to see. Theological dog whistles in the ostensibly secular New York Times! Wasn't this what so appalled Jonathan Z. Smith in our first class reading, parsing a Times Op-Ed by Billy Graham blithely asserting that Jim Jones was demonic as though this were a category all agreed on?
Talk about telling people they don't understand their own religion! And by what right? Don't we, students of Theorizing Religion, want to claim from the pundits the mantle of the "religious expert" to call this out?
