Religious experts

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.

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?

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?

Religion-making

Fiddling with the syllabus for my post-China "Theorizing Religion" I'm deciding to juxtapose China and the US in a religion/law discussion. We'll read Yang Fenggang's essay on "Red, Black and Gray Markets" for religion in China, and a piece Winnifred Fallers Sullivan wrote for "The Immanent Frame" after the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby/Wheaton College decision last year - the one which granted "closely held" corporations liberty of religious conscience. That decision will doubtless be in the news as gay marriage finds its way across the land, one wedding caterer at a time, and it will be stimulating to have a discussion which transcends the American case.

The two pieces will also fit into what's become the organizing theme of this iteration of the course, "religion-making" - a term I borrow from a recent book by Marcus Dressler and Arvind-Pal S. Mandair but will use more broadly than they do. Defining religion and religions (and secularisms, too) is something done by all sorts of entities - scholars, crusaders for and against particular faiths, and the state too. The academic space won't be presented as the privileged site for such definition, but as the one which best allows critical scrutiny of this broader phenomenon. In these two pieces we'll see not encouter the travails of state definition of religion, but the difficult question whether the state can avoid defining religion. As the name of the post (also the name of one of her books) "The Impossibility of Religious Freedom" suggests, Sullivan thinks it cannot.

And then, rereading Sullivan's piece, there's this challenge to liberal views of religion as something essentially private and ecclesiastic:

American religion today does not happen in churches. Many American Christians have, for a long time, engaged in a kind of DIY religion free from the regulations of church authorities. Their religion is radically disestablished free religion, defined not by bishops and church councils, but by themselves—ordinary Americans reading their Bibles, picking and choosing from among a wide array of religious practices. Indeed, Americans have always been incredibly varied, creative, and entrepreneurial in living out what they take to be their religious obligations—religious obligations that range far beyond the prescriptions of the mainline churches, which seem staid, contained, and tamed to the many who consider their own religious practices, unapproved by traditional religious authorities, to be alive with the spirit. They find their religious community and their religious fields of action in places other than churches—including the marketplace.

Justice Sotomayor claims in her dissent in Wheaton College to have “deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations.” Why is the exercise of religion by Hobby Lobby any less deserving of Justice Sotomayor’s, or of the US government’s, respect than the work of the Catholic Hospital Association or the Little Sisters of the Poor? Why should churches and religious orders be obviously and unproblematically exempt, particularly in the aftermath of a series of sexual and financial scandals, while Hobby Lobby is not? Why disdain the representations of the Greens and the Hahns that they consider their businesses to be a religious ministry? Where is it written in the Constitution that only the religious practices of churches or church-related non-profits are entitled to accommodation?

Unchosen choice

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!

Taking it personally

The Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision was announced while my friends M and H were helping me finish cleaning up my apartment on Monday. It's bad news for the Affordable Care Act - though I suppose that if the ACA survives the death of a thousand cuts its enemies plan for it (if the House Republicans' nuclear option doesn't do the trick), this might wind up hastening the day we abandon the bizarre idea that healthcare should be provided through one's work rather than as an entitlement of citizenship. If Americans are entitled to something, the state needs to see they get it.

It's harder to see a possible silver lining to the growing recognition of corporations as legal persons (already a grotesque distortion of the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment) entitled to things citizens are. The baleful Citizens United ruling recognized corporations as entitled to political expression (which, since they can't yet officially vote, can only mean buying influence). Now it seems a "closely held" corporation (90% of corporations in the land) can have religious convictions, and is entitled to live out the views it is thought to share with its owners in the workplace.

The blogosphere is abuzz with nightmare scenarios of religious weirdos and reactionaries who have a controlling interest in companies claiming a religious right to avoid stipulations not only of health care but civil rights protections, etc., for reasons not just principled but pecuniary or prejudiced. Of course most religions are less than committed to full equality as conceived by our current political dispensation...

But I have to confess myself intrigued also at the prospect of endless decisions about what counts as a closely held religious view. I can't wait to hear Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's take on it. Sullivan is the author of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, a book arguing that the American idea that we might have state recognition of religious liberty without the state's having a theory of what counts as religion is a fantasy. Decisions about what is entitled to protection are being made all the time, often at local levels, and almost always by judges who have no academic training in the question...

Home to roost?

Another animal lesson from John Thatamanil, questioning a common view of the difference between religious studies and theology:

Comparison is understood to belong to the descriptive labor of religious studies whereas the normative work of constructive theology is expected to operate from resources drawn from within the boundaries  of a single tradition alone. Such boundedness is even taken to be the hallmark of theology: philosophy of religion can be universal, but theology must be confessional and particular. The philosopher of religion is the free-range chicken who can wander about and eat what she wants; the theologian, by contrast, must live and eat within the coop of tradition. (22)

Thatamanil is contesting this distinction from the theology side, arguing not only that comparative theology is a legitimate enterprise but that it should be part of constructive theology. (A "theology of religious diversity" is required too.) For the first centuries and the most recent, at least, Christian theologians had no choice but to articulate their faith in language shared with - even originating with - other traditions. Constructive theology was comparative theology, and should be again. Religious diversity, too treated as an irrelevance or a threat by Christian theologians, is in fact the most fruitful context for theologizing: it is not a problem but a promise. 

I'm more used to seeing the distinction made from the religious studies side, but it's refreshing to see how it looks from theology. Thatamanil is fully conversant with the critiques religious studies has been making of its terms, challenging the notion of religions as "monolithic, impermeable, tightly systematic, and unitary wholes" (43) and critical of those who want their traditions to be that way. But acknowledging that traditions have been internally mixed and mutually mingling throughout history doesn't make comparison moot: it takes us back to the constructive, normative work which builds and sustains all traditions, a work which thrives in diversity. 

Actually religious studies has been refusing this reality for a while, too. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan appears in my classes to expose the impossibility of religious neutrality (in scholarship or law), to recognize that, whether we admit it or not, whenever we opine about religion we are doing theology of one kind or another. But it's harder for a free-range chicken to admit that coops are good for chickens. Sullivan glosses "speaking theologically" as "speaking directly of the existential realities that we all face," but compared to the overlapping worlds of study and practice and dialogue which Thatamanil describes, that seems pretty slim pickings. 

John J. Thatamanil, Circling the Elephant: A Comparative Theology of Religious Diversity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020)

Courting trouble

For the penultimate session of "Theorizing Religion" today, we read a recent blogpost by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on the legal incoherence of notions of religious freedom:

The notion that religion exists and can be regulated without being defined is a fiction at the heart of religious freedom protection.

We read this is as a reminder that, free as our discussions in the academy (and even in our private lives) might seem to be about what counts as religion, etc., in real life what's sanctioned is constrained by legal definitions woefully uninformed by research and reflection about religion in general and about the diverse hybrid realities of contemporary US religion in particular. Sullivan is calculatedly frustrating - she doesn't suggest a way out of our jurisprudential fix; there can't be a neutral definition of religion, fair to all comers. But we got mired in details about drug laws in Oregon, cemetery practice in Florida, contraception for employees of closely held craft supply megastores in Oklahoma... and that evangelical "wedding cake artist" in Colorado whose case was heard before the Supreme Court last week.

It all left a bitter taste. Why? Because religion is not nice? Because reality is messy, and law can't fix it? Because we can't all just get along? Because life isn't just one long liberal arts seminar?

Everything comes together

"Theorizing Religion" rocked today. A pairing of readings I first tried last year, which didn't quite work then, did everything I hoped it would and more. The readings are Yang Fenggang's influential essay on the sociology of Chinese religion "The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China" and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's reflection on the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby and Wheaton College decisions, "The Impossibility of Religious Freedom." Last year I started with the latter and couldn't get anyone to engage seriously with the former. Today we spent time with Yang first - I can tell some pretty interesting stories about the Chinese religious situation - in order to have a comparative framework for thinking about Sullivan: ours isn't the only constitution claiming to protect "freedom of religion." But even before that, we spent a few minutes reviewing issues from last week's readings, Diana Eck on religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism and an excerpt of "exclusivist" Karl Barth's "The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion."

A lot to cover in 100 minutes - don't worry, I won't try to recreate it here! - and possible only because we're in the final stretch of a course and I was able to describe and link things through references to earlier readings, from Jonathan Z. Smith, Saba Mahmood and Meredith McGuire to Friedrich Schleiermacher, Karl Marx and Mircea Eliade. (It's something of a specialty of mine, this relentless relating and recapitulating.) If you're familiar with all these, you might be able to guess how they all came together. If not, I'll just tell you that by the end the "real world" relevance of old and new theories of religion was palpably clear, and the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment idea of liberal religion as an assurance of "nice" religious pluralism. Just in time for the return with a vengeance of "religious freedom" attacks on civil rights, and, perhaps, Barth-like religious responses to them.

Nuggets

Two nuggets from the Religious-Secular Divide conference, which in the end made me dejected for secularism. We learned that all religion gets Protestantized (subjectivized, privatized, reduced to sincerity of belief rather than action) in America - by law and sociology - and that nonbelief has become just another form of religion in this respect. (When someone asked a panel about Mainline Protestantism today, people froze as if asked about the UFOs.) What we're stuck with, if would seem from the conference, is the politically important but pretty shallow problems of pluralism and sincerity in a fundamentally disenchanted world.

"The American way to be secular is to be religious." - Winnifred Sullivan

"In the United States, freedom of religion is the freedom to act Protestant even when you're not." - Janet Jakobsen, quoted by Ann Pellegrini

The problems of the day

A new academic year means a new iteration of "Theorizing Religion," the one required course for our minor in religious studies. Revising it each year is a chance for me to accommodate what seem to be new issues and approaches in the academic study of religion, as well as the concerns and interests of our students. (Last year, you'll recall, I decided to address students' religious illiteracy by using MOOCs.- It's never easy, since you have to take something out to accommodate anything new. The next year you assess if the cost was worth the benefit. Over time, some texts have found their way in and out and back in again - Tomoko Masuzawa's account of the 19th century western construction of Buddhism as universal and Islam as not is one. This year the core of classic texts, which I'd tried to replace with mini-lectures last year to make way for MOOCs on world religions, is back - hello again, Hume and Schleiermacher! But the MOOCs are there too (winnowed to just the strongest, the ones on Buddhism and Islam), taking fewer class periods because of the awkward gift of three holidays within our first four weeks.

The biggest change this time around involves politics. The shibboleth of "religious liberty" has become a central cudgel in the current administration's arsenal of reaction, and will surely be front and center in the news as a new Supreme Court Justice nominee is vetted, and as the conservative movement seeks grounds for new cases. (The Masterpiece "cake artist" has been persuaded to sue the State of Colorado again.) But there's also the question of the president's most faithful base, "white Evangelicals," whom many - including many religious people - deride as hypocrites, if they are Christian at all. Aren't they? On the other hand, when we read J. Z. Smith's famous critique of the category of "cults," used by mainstream Christians to distance themselves from the People's Temple, we'll have to contend with the claim that the president's supporters are a cult, some even embracing that term!

So what new readings am I including? There will surely be new religious freedom debates in the next months so I'm reserving a class near the end of the semester to see what Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, the tireless critic of the very idea one could have a neutral policy on religious freedom, will have written about them. (Last year we read her take on "Hobby Lobby" - who's to say one's business isn't a religious concern? Religion as essentially private is itself a religious view, contingent and unrepresentative.) An older piece by Saba Mahmood is being replaced by a newer one challenging the glib assumption of secularists that they are reasonable while religion traffics in emotion. On the other hand, political theorist William Connolly's essay "The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine" is joining the team (indeed the day after the November election), with its affect-centered non-explanation for the partnership of Christianity and capitalism. But, in conjunction with our reading on religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, we'll also read the Barmen Declaration, theological exclusivism as radically anti-authoritarian. More about all those as we get to them. It's all a lot more complicated in practice than liberals (like yours truly) imagine it is in theory.

This is also the time of Black Lives Matter, and this course needs a more consistent engagement with white supremacy, once again apparently on the ascendant. So we're spending a week mid-semester on a splendid new work in the anthropology of religion, Elizabeth Pérez's Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions; also a brilliant work of theory, it also builds out the "lived religion" and "religion-making" themes which have been part of the class for a while now. And I've decided early on to feature part of black liberation theologian James Cone's last book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which calls out so-called Christians in America for ignoring lynching, and for failing to realize Jesus was lynched, too. Cone makes you want to cry out that "white Christianity is not Christianity!" but it will be my duty as educator to note that this claim, appropriate in a work of theology, isn't available - at least not in the same way - for a scholar of religion.

Don't be that guy

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.

Adirondacks

Well, it's no wonder we found ourselves placed for peak leaf peeping. Our four-day escape from NYC - longest trip since January, and only the second involving overnight stays since covid arrived - took us north, and then farther north. We visited friends in Sullivan County and stayed over in Poughkeepsie before staying two nights in an Airbnb in Schuylerville, which allowed two day trips to the mighty Adirondacks. At first 4000 feet didn't sound like "High Peaks" to me but we deferred to the maples.

Synchronicity

It sometimes happens that issues from different courses I'm teaching align - always fun - but I wasn't expecting that to happen this semester. "Theorizing Religion," "Who New: A History of The New School" and the "Teaching and Learning Seminar" for peer advisers, three entirely different courses in entirely different fields? And yet it's sort of happened this week, over a surprising thing: the oddity and ubiquity of the "neutral" liberal state.

In "Theorizing Religion" we've finished the run-through of the great texts in the field, and entered the end zone which complicates and updates them, confronting them with contemporary pluralism, secularism and post-secularism, post-colonial, queer and lived religion perspectives. Yesterday's readings were from Tisa Wenger's We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom, an engaging account of a debate in the newspapers over the status of dances among the Zuñi and others. The dances had earlier been described by the Protestant missionaries working with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to assimilate and "civilize" the Native Americans as varieties of paganism, demonic or debauched, and called costumbres by the Zuñi themselves (they used the word religion for their Catholicism). Starting in the mid-1920s a group of modern artists, anthropologists and feminists ushered in a new understanding of the dances as themselves religion. This protected them under the US constitution's protection of religious freedom, but brought all the baggage of the "modernists" (who liked their religion "primitive" and timeless).

It's a fascinating story. It also left us right smack in the middle of recent arguments that the category of "religion" is a legal category, defined not by scholarship or practice but by the state... and perhaps serving nobody's interests so well as it does those of the state. Yes, religions are protected from each other's judgment, and individuals from abuse by their own traditions, but all decisions are made by legislators, officials and, ultimately, judges. I'm not sure there's a better way of managing the religious field (Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, central among these arguments, doesn't see an end to the tunnel either) but it's a bit of a rude awakening after months of imagining that the only players are religious folk and scholars, however dogmatic!

In "Teaching and Learning," this week wraps up the "Sex and Safety" section, run for us by university health educators and student health advocates. The overarching approach is "harm reduction": it's not the school's business to tell you whether or not to be sexually active or to use intoxicants, but whatever choices you make, we want you to avoid harming yourself or others. Sex should be safe and consensual, and drug or alcohol use controlled. Each year there are a few students who think this curriculum endorses sexual activity and drug use when it should be discouraging them (aren't illegal drugs, well, illegal?) but the health educators explain that it's not for them to question people's life choices. It's the stance of public health. What's proven not to work is pathologizing behavior, even behavior that may be bad for people: an anti-drug policy wouldn't reduce drug use but would guarantee more overdoses, just as anti-sex policies would produce more STDs.

I'm not suggesting an analogy between the liberal state's view on religious freedom and our university's harm reduction policy on sex and drugs, not exactly... though it might be good to think with! The real reason the liberal state was on my mind was the epoch in New School history we entered this week, when we had decisively become a university with many divisions, graduate as well as a burgeoning undergraduate curriculum, and, for the first time in our history, a residential community. The president who led New School through this transition, Jonathan Fanton, made a point of insisting that a university was not a state - by which he meant that it couldn't be administered by
some kind of democratic referendum system - but in many other ways his understanding of our achieved universityhood was very statelike. You could call it the apparatus of the university as bureaucracy protecting freedom.

Fanton published many of his talks in a book called The University and Civil Society, and among the week's readings for our course were three chapters from this book. Convocation 1994 marked the 75th anniversary of The New School and the beginning of a new era as a residential university. Parsons 1992 Commencement called for an alumnae network of not just rights but responsibilities, including ensuring "visual progress" around the world. And a letter to the university community in 1989 discussed the Matsunaga Exhibit and freedom of expression.

What came to be known as the "Matsunaga Affair" was a huge event on campus. An exhibition of 350 corporate logos by the Japanese designer Shin Matsunaga, on display in the Parsons gallery, included one for the soft drink Calpis which included a crude stereotyped image of an African American. A few days before the exhibition was to close, Lang poet Sekou Sundiata, an African American, defaced it, drawing a big blue X through it and, in the passepartout above, wrote This is racist bullshit and signed his name. Several students subsequently signed, too. Big fracas followed: a work of art (actually a reproduction) had been defaced! Sundiata should be condemned! The image was to be condemned! The exhibition should be taken down because of it!

Fanton wrote of the conflict between "freedom of expression" and "freedom from intolerance and harassment," values he was sure everyone at The New School shared. Sekou (unnamed) had gone too far in trying to censor the objectionable image, but it was great that people had protested. Fanton personally found the image offensive, too. But the university could and should do nothing - not even add a sign indicating that it was aware the image was objectionable. Any reaction would imply that every other object or expression met with university approval, and, more fundamentally, would suggest that the university had the right and perhaps the duty to make such judgments. Fanton hoped the community would understand that the university guaranteed freedom of expression precisely by taking no stands on any question. The exhibition of course stayed up, and heated discussion continued. We contrasted Fanton's view with that of faculty members who insisted that the abstract account of values in conflict ignored the historical setting - a school which had an exemplary record on freedom of expression but nothing like that on anti-racism. What would you say?

I don't want to push the analogy too far, but in each of these classes we came up against the difficulties of the minimal, neutral, merely procedural liberal state. The state, or university, protects its citizens' right to maximum freedom of choice by apparently making no choices of its own. In doing so, however, it permits many behaviors which might be objectionable and in ways which render the public sphere that much more dependent on the absent arbitrage of the state...

Academic

One of the students in "Theorizing Religion" asked me a stumper of a question yesterday. She's a returning student, who's spent years doing other things before coming back to complete her BA, and always brings a remarkable freshness and thoughtfulness to discussions. Her question was about a word she'd seen crop up in several of our articles which she realized she wasn't sure about. What, she asked, is "the Academy" - presumably not the training place for Jedi?!

The term has indeed featured in everything we've read so far. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan warned that where ordinary believers' understanding of religion of differs from that of the Academy it's not clear the latter should be deferred to. Jonathan Z. Smith argued that religious studies only deserves its place in the Academy if it lives up to Enlightenment ideals of intelligibility. Saba Mahmood suggested that the Academy is a privileged and precious place space where, unlike others, difficult questions can and should be left open.

So what is the Academy. you know, where they do the self-conscious thing called the "academic study of religion"? Once posed it's not so easy to answer! I said something about scholarship and was grateful when another student mentioned peer-review, but then felt obliged to add something about the academy's value so society at large. Which is? Preserving old knowledge and forging new? Providing materials and contexts for the education of a free citizenry? A space where the demands of the day are kept at bay, where long and short-term denizens can participate in the conversation of humankind? 

Each of these raises questions of its own... many of which resonate with the particular questions the "academic study of religion" poses itself. Are theological schools part of the Academy? Monasteries? What about other professional and vocational schools? Law schools? Art schools? Research institutes in science or humanities? Think tanks? Liberal arts colleges? Continuing-ed curricula? A New School for Social Research?

(Unrelated) image: caladiums from idyllic Jefferson Market Public Library

Back on course

Classes have started! Theorizing Religion tried to make sense of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, and New School Histories took a trip to the centennial exhibition "In the historical present." The shapeless days of summer are still a recent memory but now, with the students in the room, it's all systems go!

Con Pro

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Just finished an astounding book. It's the recent translation of an untranslatable classic of Arabic literature, the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, written about 900 years ago. It's a collection of fifty tales, in each of which the same old man under wildly different pretenses persuades a different group of people to give him money or wine. Sometimes he appeals to their sense of justice, sometimes to their sense of mercy, always to their appreciation for virtuosity and wit. By the time they realize he was not who he claimed to be, the man - his name is Abu Zayd - has vanished, though the narrator al-Harith, a younger man who manages always to show up in a town when Abu Zayd is about to speak, always tracks him down afterwards. But as often as not, those duped don't feel cheated - such is the splendor of his eloquence. 

Such, indeed, is the splendor of the Maqāmāt's eloquence that it has for most of a millennium been the key text used by Muslims studying the language in which Allah revealed the Qur'an. There are apparently innumerable manuscripts and editions, almost always full of commentary and explanation, for the fifty tales explore every avenue of eloquence and accent, puzzle, reference, rhythm or rhyme available in Arabic - more than anyone unassisted could know.

This all makes it an impossible challenge for a translator, unless that translator is as splendid a shape-shifter as Abu Zayd. I can't compare with the original, but the translation by Michael Cooperson, under the title Impostures, is one of the most remarkable things I have ever read. In order to convey the range of language of the Maqāmāt and to honor the fact that every tale (except perhaps the last) involves an elaborate deceit, Cooperson offers Fifty Rogue's Tales Told Fifty Ways, writing in the style of every kind of English literature and argot, from Chaucer to Gilbert & Sullivan to Woolf, from Cockney rhyming slang to Los Angeles Spanglish and Singaporean Singlish, from online Anglish (using only words with Anglosaxon roots) to contemporary management jargon or self-help psychology. (An intermediate insporeation is Raymond Quéneau's Exercises de Style.) Each chapter duly includes a glossary and bibliography, as well as notes explaining how specific details of the Arabic original have been rendered in this particular language. And since Abu Zayd always spins out poems in different meters, there's poetry in each one, too, usually in a kindred if different style than his main con (whether sonnet or doggerel or everything in between)... or the narrator's, which is different again. The erudition involved would crush you if it weren't all so well done - and such fun!

Before you're even a quarter of the way in, you start to appreciate English in a new way - as a global language, with a complex history and riches of street and literary convention and invention beyond imagining. And then through that you're able to grasp that Arabic might be similarly capacious - indeed already was long before English was anything at all! The delight you feel at Cooperson's vast knowledge and limitless wit connects you to of all the people who studied the original... but also to the fifty sets of people conned by Abu Zayd. I found myself marveling at the profound sophistication of a civilization which so appreciates literary art and artifice.

And then wowed and cowed at the thought that all this enjoyment of language's capacity to enchant - and deceive - served to make people fluent in the language of the divine. Was the reader's pleasure in the ingenuity of the impostures no threat to piety? Apparently not! Again, what depths of spiritual sophistication this bespeaks, and what dazzling depths in the divine. How terribly poor a tradition would be that was uninterested in or even threatened by language's capacity to charm, that thought that any important truth - not to mention divine truth - could or should be merely literal.

I mentioned that the last tale might be an exception to Abu Zayd's prodigious capacity of invention. In it, Abu Zayd, feeling his mortality, repents of his ways, using his last haul (for yes, there is an audience, so moved by the sincerity of his repentance that they give him many gifts) to build a house of prayer, and ends his days in constant prayer. As he explains to the young narrator, his final trick seems to have caught him: when he asked the people's prayers that he be forgiven, they actually worked. Cooperson renders this tale in the language of the autobiography of Margery Kempe (d. after 1438). 

Be thi fadyr, I stode beforn him in dowt, and in purpose to desseyven hem, but than I was steryd in my soule to contricyon. He is wel blyssed that thei hymn liken, and dampnyd is he by hem acursyd! 

[By thy father, I stood before them in doubt, and in purpose to deceive them, but then I was stirred in my soul to contrition. He is well blessed that they him like, and damned is he by them accursed!] (50.7; [NYU Press, 2020] 473)

But Cooperson's chosen the idiom of Kempe because he thinks this might just be Aby Zayd's final ruse - and he finds Kempe's account of her conversion a little unconvincing. Abu Zayd's final parting words to his friend, we learn in Cooperson's notes to the chapter, cites from an earlier text 

part of a conversation between Moses and his teacher, a mysterious teacher referred to as al-Khidr. The latter has just performed a series of inexplicable actions—knocking a hole in a boat, killing a boy, and repairing a wall in a town full of misers. Moses, who had promised not to ask about anything al-Khidr might do, is unable to keep his promise. Al-Khidr then bids him farewell, but before taking his leave explains that each of his apparently senseless acts was performed for some greater good. … With this allusion, Abu Zayd seems to be suggesting that all of his tricks and lies contain some lesson for al-Harith, who is too obtuse to grasp it. (481)  

But isn't the entire text composed of such deceits? The confidence of this book of confidence tricks puts me in mind of Bayle's Dictionnaire, which seemed to many to be a skeptical undermining of all certainties but may have been a work of piety, helping us feel the hollowness of all our best efforts at making sense of a reality thus known to be more profound than we can ever hope to grasp. I don't think that's Cooperson's take, but he's confident enough as a translator to let the reader twist in the wind as Allah may or may not have Abu Zayd...

I've heard of people who became Muslim because of the beauty of the recitation of a text in a language they didn't even understand, artistry divine. But the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī's artistry is human - too. What of our capacity to be overjoyed by the unending play of deception and revelation?

RItual ending

The final class session of "Theorizing Religion" is devoted to final reflections - students each get a chance to share theirs, and I surprise them by telling them I've done one as well. This is becoming something a ritual for me, since I've taught some version of this course pretty much every year since I started teaching. I didn't point out that that is longer than many of them have been around! But, in response to a question from one student, I did reflect a little on how things have changed. There was a time when most of the students believed the secularization thesis - that religion was on the way out. Then there was a time when students couldn't understand how anyone could ever have thought religion wouldn't be here, for better or for worse. This year's class was a mix of the two - though their responses suggested that each had found their assumptions challenged. I must still be doing something right!

Other things have changed about the course too, like the inclusion of the MOOCs as a way of acknowledging students ignorance of religious traditions, and discussions of religious freedom in American law which put the "what is religion and who decides?" questions in a stark new light. But something else emerged in this year's iteration, a better way of folding "lived religion" into a theory of religion course. After lots of reading and discussion on religion and "world religions," we turned to "lived religion" as a recognition that religion is lived differently by different people, usually in ways which the systematizers and centralizers of traditions deplore. This resonates with the "DIY religion" approach Winnifred Fallers Sullivan has described as the American way in religion, intuitively right for our class. But we weren't finished: the next section of the course introduced the masters of suspicion and was centered on the question "do religious people know what they're doing?"

I think I'll keep this for next time, as it's uncomfortable in all the right ways (for me too). We'd like to think that people know what's best for themselves - the "I'm okay, you're okay" relativism which I've long seen as students' decent if flabby response to religious diversity (not to mention the premise of a "self-designed" college curriculum!). But in the real world, people are challenging others' self-understandings all the time. And not just psychologists, sociologists and the like. Consciousness raisers and social critics more generally are doing that, too, and missionaries for various faiths and unfaiths. Friends, too! Next time I want to play up the theological (in the broad sense - not just Christian) challenge. We came close to it a few times this year in discussion of "white Evangelicals," most explicitly in James Cone's claim that many white Americans' faith wasn't actually Christianity at all. We didn't do full justice to the complement later in the course, Karl Barth's argument that "religion" in all its forms is a form of faithlessness. Next time? Maybe with a Buddhist complement?

I imagine next year's reflection roundup will be enough like its predecessors. Someone will say they still haven't arrived at a definition of religion, and another will say there's value in the many different ones we encountered, and someone will wonder if this isn't true of all categories. Perhaps, as again this year, someone will opine that, in fact, everything that exists just is, beyond definition. Several will say they came in with strong views about religion and religious people and that these have been tempered by something like respect; today someone said ours has been the most "compassionate" space for discussion of religion she's ever been in. That made me happy. And another, whose response said your method of teaching has ... help[ed] me to approach the topic of religion completely unbiased and neutral, open to everything, while also accepting and being conscious of my biases and opinions and went on to say I want to know more words, I want to know more perspectives, and I want to use those new words to say exactly what I mean when I respond to those perspectives. Bingo!

New blurb for theorizing

I've carried a course introducing the discipline of religious studies with me since I first started professoring. Once called "Approaches to the Study of Religion" and a lecture, it became a seminar and was renamed "Theorizing Religion" by a short-lived colleague here, and that name has stuck. The upcoming academic year will mark my tenth time teaching it at Lang. Perhaps by next year it will get a new name, "Religion Making."

Revisiting the syllabus each year has become a ritual, a chance to take stock of my changing understanding of my discipline, as well as of the context in which I'm teaching it. Assignments have changed as well as readings, which encircle a relatively stable core of "classic texts" in newer debates and perspectives. (I agonize about the core each time. Canons exist only because professors say so. Is it really appropriate to subject students to the old roster of dead white men? And yet, after two decades in the field, I have - not without chagrin - to acknowledge that few of the more contemporary readings I've assigned over the years are still being used. This isn't because they're out of date, but because they are part of growing and changing discussions... Still, in these growing changing discussions, those old classics - which are out of date! - keep coming up! We're constituted as a field - and able, to the extent that we are, to talk across generations - through our formative engagements with these classics. I can't do the counter-canon thing. I teach critical awareness and creative engagement through wrestling with compromised legacies.

And yet I've been moving toward what I'm now calling "religion making" as a focus for some time. The foundation, I suppose, lies in the seminar itself - an educational set-up where knowledge is put together by the a particular group of people in discussion, rather than handed down by a lecturer (or texts) representing a field, a discipline. The particularity of the particular group matters, too. When I first arrived, Lang had no majors, and religious studies still isn't a major. I'm still grateful for the students who concentrated in religious studies, but most students, even in this class, aren't. The course has to be useful for psychologists and historians and students in culture and media, too. And writers and artists - for Lang has many students hoping to establish themselves as artists. How can I be of service to them - and they to the class? Seminars work because the participants are not just empty vessels, waiting to be filled by professorial instruction, but come with perspectives, questions, insights, identities of their own - what I've in the last year learned to call "prior knowledge."

And of course many of the students, whether they're taking few or many courses in religious studies, aren't taking it to learn about religious studies. They're curious about religion - something carefully or carelessly omitted from their previous education. Religion has become one of the things Americans encounter in college. Some come because they are fascinated or disturbed by religious fanatics, others are on a spiritual quest of their own. None are, let's face it, interested in the discipline of religious studies (let alone its endless self-critique). But perhaps I can show them how to be - and why to be interested, even if academia isn't their thing.

So here's where I've ended up in the Fall 2016 edition. (I'm happy to show you the readings and assignments, too.) Religious studies shares the stage with "religion-making," a broader category which includes religion as presented by media and framed by law, engaged by politics and sublimed by art - and which welcomes students' prior knowledge. Each is offered as necessary but not sufficient. The academic approach may be new to them, and I hope to demonstrate its value to them, but they are already working with categories and practices of "religion" as they walk in the door. Learning to theorize together in a seminar setting should make them more reflective, responsible "religion makers," both in school and out. (I don't print out the syllabi until Monday, so if you notice typos etc, let me know!)

Recent calls for better policing of the borders of the field ring hollow 

to my mind. What is fascinating about religion are the borderlands. 

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, “Teaching Religion” 

The category of religion has been described as "the most ideological of Western creations." (Dubuisson 2003: 147) It is a modern western concept, born perhaps in 1799, yet most of what it is thought to refer to is non-modern or non-western. At the same time, it seems an inescapable part of articulating what it means to be human here and now. What does it reveal and obscure? Can it be thought about in non-mystifying ways? 

This course weaves together a critical history of the academic discipline of religious studies with explorations of everyday “religion-making” in the media and our own lives. We read classic and contemporary theories of the nature, history and value of religion to develop a reflective understanding of the concept as well as of the phenomena which are made to bear its name. Unexamined views of what religion is (and isn’t) blind us to the true challenges of those practices, beliefs and traditions regarded as religious – as well as those not so regarded. 
Many other categories constitutive of western modernity interlock with the concept of religion. Understanding the travails of religious studies also offers insight into other, similarly fraught disciplines, as indeed into the nature of disciplinary projects as a whole. A critical awareness of the concept of religion and its study offers incisive perspectives on politics, gender, ethics and identity. 

But what has recently been called “religion-making” isn’t just something scholars do. We experience religion as a natural kind because it is woven into our individual, social and even political experience. Religions are made and unmade by participants as well as by critics, by high and pop culture, by individuals and communities negotiating complicated identities, by those who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” - and by the law. 

The academic study of religion is not an escape from these wider practices of making and unmaking “religion” and “religions” but a privileged place for reflection, critique, intervention and dialogue in the broader theoretical and practical challenges of our time.

PS I've found a second epigraph:

To use category names should be a commitment to tracing
the assemblages in which these categories gain a momentary hold.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 29