Fun class in "Theorizing Religion" today - one which ended up in a different place than students expected, with things relevant and complicated in ways they hadn't anticipated. Our reading was a chapter in Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen analyzing the stories Lucumí initiates told of themselves. Unlike what other scholars of Afro-Cuban traditions report (perhaps because many of them chose to become initiated themselves), Pérez finds the the members of the community she's studying go to great lengths to explain that they did not seek initiation out, rather "initiation was thrust upon the narrator" (149). Becoming priests of Lucumí was an "unchosen choice" (144).
We spent some time looking at antecedents, sources and parallels of such self-narration. Pérez mentions Christian stories of conversion like Paul on the road to Damascus, the Bantu practices of claiming authority through suffering called ngoma, specific 19th century Cuban contexts where expressing "a desire for Lucumí initiation" would be "tantamount to rejecting God as well as science" (159), and finally the practices of "testifying" in Protestant American churches. For these and other reasons, the story is one of struggle, resistance and ultimate surrender. But similar story structures happen in many religious traditions. I mentioned the dhami we met on our way to Kailas, who had done his darndest not to be a spirit medium, his resistance proving futile.
The idea of "unchosen choice" took us to the roots of the word "conviction" - to be "convicted" is to submit to a law whether one will or no - and so to the reality that religious identity is rarely experienced as a free choice. I explained that this was the reason Locke and other early modern Europeans argued for religious toleration (I suppose I was thinking of Bayle): we cannot choose to believe or disbelieve, and any demand that I believe or disbelieve something is nothing but an invitation to hypocrisy. Of course this goes against the easy subjectivism of many of my students, who think about religion is something people somehow choose to believe. Of course we saw Winnifred Fallers Sullivan argue that One of the lies modernity peddles is that you can and should choose your own religion in our very first class session but that was long ago and far away. I think it started to make sense today.
But it's disturbing sense. If religious freedom is respecting people's deepest unchosen commitments, what about that baker in Colorado? (I didn't have to bring him up: a student did.) His refusal to design a wedding cake for a gay couple seemed to most people I know a religious rationalization of a non- or prereligious prejudice. I could see students struggling with unexpected empathy for the baker, for whom his own preferences had nothing to do with it but God's will (as he knew it) was God's will. Can a sincere religious argument be made for some forms of discrimination? Bringing in the case where a Native American successfully defended his consumption of peyote as a religious obligation didn't get the bitter taste from our mouths. In America today "religious freedom" is experienced as a weapon of the dominant culture, not a protection of pluralism and minority cultures, but here our liberal deference to individual self-determination seemed to morph into an argument for the other side.
I didn't observe that this slippery slope takes you quickly to perdition, especially if you follow recent arguments that accord vague "moral" objections the status of unchosen choices (or rather, shows you need a Millian and not just a Lockian liberalism), nor did I recapitulate Sullivan's argument that the "impossibility of religious freedom" demands that we own our understandings of the relation of church and state as themselves theological. I'll get to that Monday, when we read about a less threatening mobilization of religious freedom from a century ago. Instead I remarked on the strange fact that many who claim protection of their "unchosen" convictions regarding gender insist on regarding homosexuality as a choice - what Amy Coney Barrett in her confirmation hearing persisted in calling "sexual preference." What's up with that?
It was late and we had to end class, but I could see synapses popping. Perhaps "fun" is the wrong word for our learning. This was not where students expected a discussion of an exotic minority community on the south side of Chicago to lead us!
