Aura of factuality

In "Theorizing Religion" today we worked our way through Clifford Geertz's famous definition of religion in "Religion as a Cultural System" with its squishy "moods and motivations," "aura of factuality," etc.,

but the election was on everyone's mind, and we decided to devote part of Wednesday's class to the 2020 election and religion. Geertz and Talal Asad's appreciative critique (Wednesday's reading) will make for a rich and complicated discussion. 

It's by turns heartbreaking and terrifying to see the refusal of Trump and his supporters to accept defeat. Not him - we long ago stopped expecting anything but bad behavior from him and his immediate Four Seasons Total Landscaping cronies. And Mitch McConnell deserves no kind thought. But what about the great majority of Trump voters who reportedly believe that the election was actually an attempted coup? I feel only contempt and fear for those who know that Biden won but think they can win on a technicality. (They must know they've been coasting on technicalities for a while, starting long before the Electoral College victory of their hero in 2016; maybe that's why they think they could get away with it again.) But many others may genuinely believe that the election was stolen - didn't their man tell them this was going to happen, and their media, and their pundits, and their... religion?

Geertz emphasizes the role of symbols and rituals in religion - they're what sustain the precarious sense of a "general order of existence" - so I've told students to bring in images. I'm bringing this one, screen-capped from an SSRC webinar I watched Friday. It's not a parody.