August beckons, and before we know it will be the start of a new academic year. High time for the annual existential ritual: finalizing the new syllabus for "Theorizing Religion." As ever I'll worry over the presence of hoary "classic texts" - and keep many of them. I'll consider whether it's worth keeping the MOOCs. I'll work to make the approach less eurocentric, and build out last year's engagement with white supremacy. I'm planning to add a recent essay from the New Yorker on mystical experience in religion, drugs and music; a chapter from a book by an evangelical historian on white evangelical Trump support; also perhaps something from a book on the Hindu nationalist concoction "Vedic science." I need something more on the ongoing weaponization of "religious freedom" in the dismantling of civil rights protections, too, especially in relation to gender and sexuality... I turned to Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, whom I have relied on for helpfully unhelpful essays on this topic for the past couple of years - her essay on the incoherence of the liberal objections to the Supreme Court's distasteful Hobby Lobby judgment, and last year the preface to the new edition of her uncompromising Impossibility of Religious Freedom. Here's her latest:
I would argue that now is a good moment to step back from the valiant efforts of legal and religious historians, sociologists and anthropologists to describe the effects of modern law on religion; we are now in a position to ask whether we are not also, like the modern state we so relentlessly criticize, victims of unintended consequences. We might see ourselves, not as well-meaning reformers, but as liberal mansplainers telling people that they don’t understand their own religion. ...
One of the many frustrating paradoxes of religious freedom as a liberal project is that having promised people religious choice, liberals cannot now, in good conscience, dictate to them what they should choose. (See my post on the Hobby Lobby decision.) Unless we are willing to start listening and speaking theologically, that is, unless we are willing to listen carefully and speak directly of the existential realities that we all face, rather than using religion as a proxy for our differences, I fear that our efforts at explanation will fall on deaf ears.
Notice served! Time to explore the possibility that an existential form of "speaking theologically" is more humble, less "mansplaining," than the liberal "academic study of religion" I ply.
I would argue that now is a good moment to step back from the valiant efforts of legal and religious historians, sociologists and anthropologists to describe the effects of modern law on religion; we are now in a position to ask whether we are not also, like the modern state we so relentlessly criticize, victims of unintended consequences. We might see ourselves, not as well-meaning reformers, but as liberal mansplainers telling people that they don’t understand their own religion. ...
One of the many frustrating paradoxes of religious freedom as a liberal project is that having promised people religious choice, liberals cannot now, in good conscience, dictate to them what they should choose. (See my post on the Hobby Lobby decision.) Unless we are willing to start listening and speaking theologically, that is, unless we are willing to listen carefully and speak directly of the existential realities that we all face, rather than using religion as a proxy for our differences, I fear that our efforts at explanation will fall on deaf ears.
Notice served! Time to explore the possibility that an existential form of "speaking theologically" is more humble, less "mansplaining," than the liberal "academic study of religion" I ply.
