Our class discussion of religion and the election, framed by ideas of Clifford Geertz and Talal Asad, did not go as planned. I suppose that's some sort of success? Students were very happy to hear each other.
We spent the first half of the class trying to reconstruct Geertz' famous definition of religion, finding none of us could remember how its parts fit together, and exploring Asad's critique of the definition for just this evanescent quality: Geertz universalizes the role religion had in the west once it had become marginal and subjective. "Bland" Geertzian religion floats free of life, politics, social relations, even culture, barely even a ghost of what it was in earlier centuries of western history, when Christianity was the main source of disciplinary knowledge and the formation of selves. The early Church Fathers would be "horrified" by the Geertzian understanding of religion as no more than "a matter of having a positive attitude to the problem of disorder, of affirming simply that in some sense or other the world as a whole is explicable, justifiable, bearable" (246). The point of religion, one might say, isn't to interpret the world but to change it!
I thought our discussion of the election might pick up on both Geertz and Asad: perhaps how the Trump faithful find in the system of symbols of "America First" an aura of factuality which makes their moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic as ways of facing an unnervingly uncertain present and future, and how the weaponization of this system showed religion to be more politically charged than Geertz imagined. Or how the religious nationalism which conflates America and Christianity refuses the modern marginalization of religion which Asad describes (at least in this article), endorsing an understanding of the need for discipline in forming selves closer to earlier periods in Christian history. But I just opened the (zoom) floor to let everyone speak who wanted, and religion barely came into up.
What the students instead said confirmed something one of my faculty colleagues mentioned in a discussion last week: our students may have more exposure to the worlds which supported Trump than we do. More, the world of the Trump faithful strikes them as so coherent that they can't imagine anyone leaving it. The rural and suburban cultures of unreconstructed racism and sexism they described, amplified by social media, seemed hermetically sealed. One observed that the "melding of Christianity, the American civil religion and the
religion of capitalism" had been going on for decades. Keenly aware of the 71 million who voted for Trump - 8 million more than 2016, one reminded us - they lamented that Biden generated none of the enthusiasm of Trump. Some folks think we're out of the woods, one reflected, but we're not, and the "performative allyship" of the summer's demonstrations has gone. Distressingly, Harris seemed to them only a token ("idolized"), as they shared discredited (well, clearly not discredited, but unfounded) claims that she's transphobic. None had any real hope for change, but sharing this dejection evidently offered a kind of solace.
One student owned that he had himself "drunk the Kool-Aid" as a Trump supporting sixteen-year-old in 2016, but conversations with a friend in 2018 had opened his mind, eventually leading him to where he is now, a proud New School progressive indignant at those who hold on to Trumpian ideas without the excuse of being immature teenagers. The story of his change of view was the only hopeful thing anyone mentioned (we hear instead about impasses and ruptured friendships) so I asked him to tell us more about what the friend had said to change his mind. It's hard to describe, he said, it was very gradual... Eventually he told us that in 2018 he'd also done acid for the first time, which "made him open to any and all ideas" and "annihilated all his preconceptions and prejudices" for weeks. That's what this conversion took?
I'd been ready to share a new Op-Ed from the Times claiming that it was a progressive swing of religious voters which handed Biden victory but instead I just listened. How thoroughly Trump has demoralized us...
Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973), 87-125: Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man, New Series 18/2 (Jun., 1983): 237-59
